


Paradise Lost

by unfolded73



Series: The Lostverse [11]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Death, Episode AU: s04e12 The Stolen Earth, Episode AU: s04e13 Journey's End, F/M, Future Fic, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 10:34:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 23
Words: 65,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10695228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfolded73/pseuds/unfolded73
Summary: Originally published December 2008-March 2009.A retelling of The Stolen Earth/Journey's End in the Lostverse set eight years after No Rest from Sound. The Doctor and Rose struggle with how to maintain their relationship after a traumatic wartime experience. How will they navigate the aftermath of Davros' threat and the metacrisis?





	1. Chapter 1

The blue police box stood at the end of a perfectly ordinary, suburban street - perfectly ordinary for the planet Symethus in the 28th century, anyway. It was late, close to midnight, when the quiet was pierced by the rapid staccato of someone walking in high heels. A blonde woman approached the box quickly and jerked a key from her pocket. She twisted it in the lock viciously and went inside, just as a man ran up behind her, catching the door before it slammed in his face. He followed her inside and the door rapped shut. Calm returned to the perfectly ordinary street. 

Inside the TARDIS, things were far from calm. 

"You were flirting," she said. 

"I was _not_ flirting." 

"Bollocks." Rose stomped up the ramp in the console room, enjoying the satisfyingly loud rattling that it caused. 

"Why does it matter? You didn't used to care!" The Doctor threw his coat over one of the coral supports. 

"So you admit it." She stood next to the console, arms crossed across her chest. 

"That's not what I said, but when you used to accuse me of flirting, it was with a nudge and a wink. Why is this bothering you so much?" 

"She was _ten years_ younger than me!" Rose shouted. 

"She was not," the Doctor scoffed. 

"She was! And a _cocktail waitress_ ," she added, in a voice that indicated this was the most damning fact of all. 

The Doctor blinked at her. "So?" 

"So? I haven't forgotten about that woman from the _Titanic_. Astroglide or whatever." 

"Astrid," he said flatly, starting to flip switches on the console. "I told you about that twelve years ago. I cannot _believe_ that you're actually throwing it in my face now." 

"Only because it shows that you have a type." 

"That's it!" he shouted, stomping over to her. "Rose, you are my _wife_. I have loved no one else in the last several decades and I have slept with no one else since the day we met. I won't ask if you can say the same." 

Rose gasped. "That was in the other universe. I didn't know I'd ever get back." 

"Exactly. Which was also the case when I met Astrid." 

As suddenly as it had come, Rose felt her anger defuse, and she wondered why she had even started such a ridiculous argument. "I know." 

The Doctor took her hand. "I don't want a cocktail waitress, I want you." 

Rose looked down at her feet. "I'm getting old." 

"Rose, you're 34, that's not old." 

"Not yet." 

He put his hand under her chin and lifted it. "Is that what this is about?" 

She sighed. "I don't know, maybe. Any day now I'm going to look older than you." 

"You know I don't care about that." 

" _I_ care." She stepped away from him and collapsed on the jump seat, feeling lost and sort of hopeless. "You forgot Jack," Rose said. She wasn't sure why she was even pointing this out, other than to have something to say. 

"What?" 

"You said you haven't slept with anyone else, but you forgot Jack." 

He smiled a thin smile. "We did that together; it was still all about you. Everything in my life is you, Rose." As she watched, his expression briefly turned bitter, but quickly reverted back to a neutral expression as he walked over and sat next to her. "I love you." 

"Me too," she said quickly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean what I said." Except she _had_ sort of meant it, it was just that she couldn't think of anything else to say. 

He put his arms around her and Rose closed her eyes. The Doctor nuzzled her neck, inhaling deeply. "Let me take you to bed," he murmured, his voice rich and seductive. 

Rose pulled away. "I'm a bit knackered, actually. I think I just want to go to sleep." Her heart sank at the wounded look in his eyes. "I'm sorry." 

"No, it's fine. Of course you're tired, it was a long day." He gave her a peck on the cheek. "I'll see you when you wake up then." 

"Yeah." Rose trudged out of the console room, feeling worse than ever. This kind of thing was becoming all too frequent - a passive aggressive comment by one of them leading to a shouting match, leading to apologies grudgingly given and grudgingly accepted. It was so damn disappointing. She knew how their friends saw them, as some kind of epic, fairy tale couple, and Rose realized that she had seen them that way too. The idea that they could actually have _marital problems_ was shaming. Pulling on pajamas and brushing her teeth, Rose crawled under the covers and retreated into the oblivion of sleep. 

When she awoke the next morning, it was with a headache and a heavy heart. She knew she had been unreasonable the night before, had known it even as she hurled accusations at the man she had loved for her entire adult life. This frustration she had been harboring for months, that she had crammed down deep inside, sprang out of her sometimes when she didn't expect it and couldn't control it. If only he hadn't spent so much of his time in the last few months hiding a part of himself away from her, beating himself up for things that he had no right to beat himself up for, she wouldn't be feeling this way. 

Rose found the Doctor in the kitchen, making breakfast, and he met her with a mug of coffee. It was a ritual they had shared literally thousands of times. 

"What did you do last night?" Rose asked, sitting down at the table. 

"Worked on the gravity stabilizer, then did some reading." 

"Still working your way through all the Dostoevsky again?" 

He put a plate of eggs and toast in front of her. "Yep." 

"I think that makes the twelfth time since I've known you." 

He thought about it. "You're probably right." Joining her at the table, he tucked into his own breakfast. 

"I forgot to tell you, Donna called the other day." 

"Ah! What did Donna have to say, then?" 

"She wants us to come to dinner," Rose replied. "I stuck the date on the monitor." 

"Is she cooking? Because if so-" 

"I'm sure Phil is cooking." 

"Well, that's fine then," the Doctor said, grinning. 

"Great. So where are we off to today?" 

The Doctor turned his attention back to his plate. "I need to go to that market on Vymelfius III to pick up a special circuit board. Won't take long; you can stay here." 

"I'd rather come with you, I think." 

He sighed with exasperation at that. "No, don't you remember? We went there before, and there was nothing you were interested in, it's all 39th centrury electronic and gravinomic devices." 

"But ... so? Why can't I go with you?" 

There was a pause. "You can," he said shortly. "It's fine, 'course you can." 

Rose put her fork down. "But you don't want me," she said, hating how small her voice sounded, hating how vulnerable this was making her feel. 

"Don't be ridiculous." 

"You don't." 

"Rose, I said you could come, what do you want from me?" He stood up from the table, carrying his plate away. "If this is about last night-" 

"It's not about that," she said, pressing the heel of her hand to her forehead. "It started _way_ before last night." 

"What are you talking about?" His back was to her and she stared at the pinstripes of his suit jacket. As her eyes blurred with tears, the red faded from sight, leaving only an expanse of blue. 

"This. You not wanting me with you. This started after the war." The Doctor said nothing, and Rose felt a tear slide down her cheek. God, she was tired of crying. "Do you have any idea what it feels like to know that you're sorry you saved me?" 

He spun at that, his brown eyes bottomless. "That's _not_ true." 

"Feels true." She stood up from the table, warding him off with a hand when he started to approach. "Just ... go wherever you want. I'll see you later." She heard him call her name once as she hurried down the hall, but he didn't follow. 

 

*** 

 

Donna dipped her finger in the sauce simmering on the stove top and put said finger into her mouth. As always, Phil's cooking was fabulous. 

"Oi! Hands off the sauce, lady," her husband Phil cried, giving her a playful smack on the bum. He was a tall, broad shouldered man with dark brown, wiry hair that was greying at the temples. Donna had assured him many times that it looked sexy and dignified, even as she continued to maintain her ginger-colored hair by artificial means. 

"Oi yourself." Donna busied herself with getting plates and glasses down from the cabinet while Phil returned to obsessing over his sauce. "It's quite tasty, by the way." 

"You don't think it needs a little more ... I don't know." He waved his hand in the air. 

"No, I don't think it needs a little more I-don't-know." 

"Cardamom?" 

Donna just rolled her eyes and carried things to the dining room to begin setting the table. 

"I came this close to inviting Linda and Steve over tonight as well," Phil called from the kitchen. 

"You _what_?" 

"Don't worry, I didn't. I know better than to try to mix our normal friends with your crazy, time-travelling friends. I just thought the Doctor and Linda together would be amusing." 

"Sure, if by amusing, you mean completely horrifying on a scale of universal destruction. Absolutely." 

Phil laughed, pulling things out of the refrigerator and setting them on the counter. "Can you help me put this salad together?" Donna walked over and pulled a knife from the block, then went to work attacking some carrots. "When was the last time you saw them?" Phil asked. 

"Who, Linda and Steve?" 

"No, not Linda and Steve. Rose and the Doctor." 

"About a month ago, maybe more." 

"Just wondering if they were doing better." 

"You mean since the war?" Everyone called it that, the five-week long nightmare that had plagued the Earth that summer. London had, for once, been spared the brunt of the damage at the hands of the Ixari, but other cities, other countries had fared far worse. The really dismaying thing about it was that first contact between the humans and the Ixari had been peaceful and friendly. The fighting had started because of a terrible error in diplomacy, and by the time the Doctor had arrived, it was a runaway train that even he couldn't stop. A month later, when the dust cleared and the Doctor and Rose returned to London, it was immediately obviously that they were deeply scarred by their experiences. They had been exhausted and distant, not even appearing to take much comfort from each other, which was unusual. "I don't know. I hope so." The doorbell rang, and Donna wiped her hands off and ran to answer it. 

"Hello!" The stood together in the doorway, the-Doctor-and-Rose, smiling wide smiles. Donna rushed to bring them into the house and hugged them both, accepting the wine they brought and hanging up the Doctor's coat in the closet. 

"Philip!" the Doctor said jovially, shaking Donna's husband's hand. "Good to see you again!" 

"You too, although seeing you always just reminds me how quickly I'm aging!" Phil said, clapping him on the back and laughing. Donna watched as Rose's face fell at those words, and she ducked past both of them and stepped into the sitting room. Donna followed. 

"So, how's everything?" Donna asked. 

Rose gave her a tight smile. "Fine. Nothing terribly life-threatening has happened lately. We went to a planet you would have loved last week, there was this posh resort ..." As Rose babbled on about deep-tissue massages and facials, Donna watched her face for a clue to how things were really going. She seemed a little tired, but more importantly none of her smiles really met her eyes. 

The dinner passed amiably, with exotic stories from the Doctor and Rose exchanged with tales of the latest news of Earth from Donna and Phil. There was nothing that Donna could put her finger on that seemed amiss - they didn't argue; they were perfectly genial with each other, but there was something off in their interactions. In Donna's experience, the two of them had always seemed to make each other happy to be alive. They took joy from the simplest of life's experiences simply because they were sharing it together. Donna saw none of that joy tonight. 

"What do you hear from Jenny lately?" Phil asked. 

"Oh, she's enjoying her studies immensely; She sent us a message from ... where was it, Rose?" 

"I don't remember." 

"I think it was the Elysium system. At any rate, she's going to be at it a while yet; she's determined to get the equivalent of a Time Lord education. Which, to be honest, isn't really possible anymore. But there are other great centers of learning in the universe, and it is to those that she's turned." 

"She'd already worked her way through the entire library on the TARDIS," Rose added. 

"So it's like you've got a daughter away at uni," Donna said, chuckling. 

The Doctor scratched his chin. "Yeah, I suppose it is a bit like that." A light seemed to dawn for the Doctor. "Donna, how would you fancy a trip, just for old time's sake?" he suddenly asked. 

Donna glanced at her husband, whose eyes were wide with surprise. "Oh, I don't think I could," she said. 

"Come on," he cajoled. "One trip. Nowhere dangerous, I promise. Just a bit of exotic shopping on a distant planet, then back again. Phil won't even know that you've been gone. Or he can join us! That would be brilliant, wouldn't it, Rose?" 

"Yeah, brilliant." 

"Oh, no," Phil said, laughing and holding up his hands. "You aren't getting me in that blue box of yours. But you can go, Donna, don't not go on my account." 

"Nowhere dangerous for you usually means somewhere terribly dangerous," Donna said, eyeing the Doctor sidelong. 

"It won't be, it'll be safe as houses! Come on, please?" 

Donna found herself smiling. "I suppose there's no harm in one trip, is there?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, when I originally wrote this, I offered so many warnings and people still got pissed at me. Story includes Tencest and character death. This is not a Journey's End fix-it fic. I didn't rewrite Journey's End in the Lostverse because I think it should have gone this way in canon. I like Journey's End, I like the Rose/Ten II pairing, and I find what Ten did at Bad Wolf Bay to be disappointing but true to the character. I adore Ten II and the potential stories to be told about him. I did write this story to explore how a Ten who had spent years in a romantic partnership with Rose would behave differently from canon!Ten. I did write it because playing with Russell's scripts was fun. I did write it to explore how this version of the Ten/alt!Ten/Rose OT3 might compare and contrast to that in fid_gin's Loved 'Verse. Mostly, I wrote it because once I thought it up, I couldn't stop thinking about it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A small section of dialogue and the setting in this part is lifted from the episode "Turn Left", by Russell T. Davies.

The Shan Shen market was crowded and noisy. Donna looked around at the pagodas, the fluttering red banners, the stalls holding all sorts of fabrics, foods, and unidentifiable sea creatures. Vendors called out to passersby, advertising their wares. Lanterns were strung onto wires and hung over their heads, giving the market a festive air that made Donna smile. There were times when she did desperately miss the excitement of travel with the Doctor, even if she never would have traded her life now for this life. She and Rose wandered several steps behind the Doctor, clad in his brown pinstriped suit, his long coat swirling around his legs. 

"You all right, Rose?" Donna asked, deciding now was as good a time as any to start figuring out what was going on between the two of them. 

"Yeah, sure, 'm fine." Her eyes were trained straight ahead. 

Donna raised an eyebrow. "I know we don't see as much of each other as we used to, but you can't fool me _that_ easily." 

Rose sighed, slowing and letting the Doctor get further ahead. "It's just … things between us are difficult right now." 

"Difficult how? Since when?" 

"Since the war." 

"You never really explained what happened to the two of you," Donna said. 

"It's complicated." 

"Ooh, you sound like your husband, you do. You start talking and let me tell _you_ if it's complicated." 

Donna watched as Rose appeared to struggle to find the words. "We were in America, working with a branch of UNIT in Washington. Well, I say working _with_ , but much of the time we seemed to be at cross purposes. The Doctor thought that given some time and resources, he could figure out a way to permanently disable the Ixari command carrier, rendering it useless to their forces. UNIT wanted it destroyed, of course." 

"So why didn't they just destroy it?" Donna asked. 

"They tried, but their weapons were useless against its shields. They wanted the Doctor to help them to take down the carrier's shields so that UNIT could blast the Ixari out of the sky." 

"Let me guess. He told them to go take a flying leap." 

Rose smirked. "Right in one." 

"Wait, you said you were in Washington?" Donna put a hand on Rose's arm, bringing her to a halt. "But that means …" 

Rose nodded. "We were there during the fall of the city. It was when I was trying to help with the wounded that I was captured by the Ixari." 

"Oh my _God_. Rose, I had no idea. What happened?" 

"I got thrown in with a bunch of other prisoners. It was so bloody cold all the time and there wasn't near enough food and water. The Ixari weren't known for keeping their prisoners alive; they weren't exactly subject to the Geneva Conventions."

"The Doctor must have gone completely mental. How did you survive?" Donna couldn't help thinking about their run-in with the Master eight years before, and how far the Doctor had been willing to go to get Rose back. 

"I was there for four days when UNIT forces stormed the prison and we were all released." 

"Well, that's lucky." 

Rose shook her head. "It wasn't luck, it was the Doctor." She looked away, blinking back tears, and Donna realized that she had arrived at the crux of the story. "UNIT gave him an ultimatum: if he disabled the shields on the command carrier, they would get me out of that prison. If he didn't, well, they had better uses for their limited resources." 

Donna's mouth fell open, and she felt a flush of anger suffuse her cheeks. "That's cruel. How could they?" 

"They did," Rose said shrugging. "So he did what they asked." 

"But ... I remember, on the news they said there were 4000 Ixari on board that ship." 

"The Doctor thought closer to 10,000. UNIT's destruction of that ship was the turning point of the war. It was just clean-up after that." Rose started walking again, and Donna stayed at her side. "He hates himself for what he did. Hates himself, and hates me a little bit too." 

Donna sputtered at that, her anger shifting course. "But _you_ didn't ask him to make that horrible choice, UNIT did!" 

"Oh, he's angry with UNIT too. Plenty of anger to go around." Rose fingered some embroidered silk at one of the tents, then shook her head at the stallholder and kept walking. "He's started to question who he is, Donna. Or what I've turned him into. You know how he is, he's all about being the last of the Time Lords with a capital 'Last'." 

"Tell me about it." 

"And now he feels like he's not even that." 

"So he's taking all of this out on _you_?" 

"He's just very distant. Like now," she said, pointing way across the market where the Doctor appeared to be haggling for a sea anemone, "couldn't wait to get away from me. Of course, I can't blame him, I've been no picnic lately either." 

"What do you mean?" 

"Been thinking a lot about the fact that I'm getting older." 

Donna glared at her. " _You're_ getting older? _You?_ Please excuse me if I have absolutely no sympathy for you on that score." 

"Sorry, I know. It's just ... he's not getting older. Or, he is, but really slowly. I'm going to catch up and pass him pretty soon." 

"Just in terms of appearance, Rose. And you know he's not going to care about that." 

"I think he's going to care a little bit. He might be over 900, but he still likes to look at me. In twenty years ..." 

"In twenty years, you'll still be his wife, and he takes that seriously. Don't even try to convince me otherwise." 

"I'm not saying he'll break his vows, I'm saying-" 

"Tell your fortune, lady? The future predicted. Your life foretold." Both women swung around to look at a woman sitting outside a tent. She was dressed in red, Chinese robes and had her hair pulled back severely from her face. Her eye makeup was black and heavy. 

"No thanks," Donna said politely. 

"Don't you want to know? If you're going to be happy?" 

"I'm happy right now, thanks." 

"You've got red hair," she responded quickly. "The reading's free, for red hair." 

Rose snorted. "Course it is." 

The fortune teller gave up on Donna and turned to Rose. "What about you, lady? Tell your fortune?" 

"I sincerely doubt that you'd be working in a market like this if you had that power," Rose said, smirking. 

"I have powers that you cannot imagine, my dear," the woman responded, a harder edge coming into her voice. 

"You have no idea what I can imagine," Rose replied, and not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time, Donna was struck with how very like the Doctor Rose had become. "Come on, Donna." She took Donna's hand and led her away from the tent. "She was a bit weird, wasn't she?" 

Donna shrugged. "I don't know, I guess she was, now that you mention it." They moved on, continuing to peruse the wares in the stalls they walked past. "Anyway, you were saying?" 

Rose sighed heavily. "It's just, between his identity crisis and my insecurities, things aren't right between us." 

"Have you thought about taking a second honeymoon? You could go back to that lovely place you went after you got married, that sounded perfect. Or," Donna said, smirking, "remember when you first got back to this universe, and the two of you spent like, a week in bed?" 

"Yeah, at your insistence, as I recall." 

"Maybe you should do that." 

"God, I don't think I'm physically capable of that much sex now. That was insane." 

"Might be fun to give it a try," Donna smirked. 

For the first time all day, Rose laughed a genuine laugh. "Yeah, I suppose it might." Rose looked around the market, shielding her eyes with a hand. "Well, speaking of the Doctor, we should probably track him down, don't you think? It's getting to be time for lunch." 

Lunch turned out to be an assortment of too-spicy food at an open-air café, during which the Doctor talked nonstop. Even knowing him as well as she did, Donna was amazed that he was able to actually consume any food with his mouth running the way it was. When they paid their bill and wandered back out into the bright sunlight, Donna stuck close to the Doctor, so that when Rose moved over to another stall and began to haggle for some earrings, Donna could make her move, which was to smack the Doctor hard on the arm. 

_"What?"_

"What the hell is wrong with you? Mooning after some dead Ixari while your marriage is hanging on by a thread - are you _completely_ daft?" 

His expression suddenly became the definition of closed-off. "What did Rose say?" 

"Well, first of all, she didn't have to say anything. I could tell something was wrong when I saw the two of you after the end of the war, and I could tell things weren't quite right between you last night. So I ask again, what the hell is wrong with you?" 

The Doctor started walking quickly away, and Donna had to jog a bit to keep abreast of him. "Why don't you ask her what the hell is wrong with _her_? She's the one who suddenly doesn't trust me to talk to a waitress." 

"She's worried that you aren't going to find her attractive as she gets older. All women feel that way, and most of us have husbands who are getting older at the same time as us. Cut her some slack." 

"I've never given her any cause to doubt me, Donna. I've given over every part of my life to her; being her husband is all that I am." 

"That's a strange thing to say," Donna said, trying to draw him out. The Doctor said nothing, just looked away, and Donna tried the direct approach. "Will you talk to me about what happened during the war?" 

"I think you probably know already." 

"I know that you rescued her, the most important person in your life. You did exactly what anyone would have done." 

"I'm not anyone." 

"So, what?" Donna crossed her arms over her chest and looked him in the eye. "You would prefer that she was dead?" 

"Of course not. But ... look, the point isn't whether I made the right choice or not. The point is it shows that I'm not ..." He fumbled for the right words. "I'm the only one out there, watching over the universe. But it's not a job I can really be trusted with, is it? That was a command carrier, thousands of Ixari on board, and yes, they were Earth's enemy. But what will it be next time? A planet? A solar system? Would I let two universes fracture to get back to her now? I have the potential to wield enormous, terrible power, Donna. Doesn't that scare you to death?" 

Donna met his gaze evenly. "No." 

"Why not? It should." 

"Because ... you're the Doctor. You're the most noble man I've ever known, and I trust you to make the right decision." 

The Doctor looked away, apparently at a loss for any response. Staring over Donna's shoulder, he frowned. "What's going on over there?" he said, pointing. Donna turned and saw a crowd gathering, huddled around something on the ground. Before she could say anything, the Doctor had headed off in the direction of the commotion, and Donna followed swiftly on his heels. 

"Clear the way, I'm a doctor," he was saying, and Donna was trying to work her way through the press of bodies, when suddenly she heard _"ROSE!"_ ripped from the Doctor's throat. When Donna finally got to the Doctor's side, it was to find Rose curled into the fetal position on the ground, keening with pain. 

"Rose, darling, what hurts? What happened?" He was looking frantically for any obvious injury. 

"My head," Rose gasped, writhing on the dirty ground. "It's killing me." 

Donna turned to the crowd of onlookers. "Oi! Clear off! She's just sick, it's not a free show!" Looking back at the ground, the Doctor had his fingers on Rose's temples, his eyes closed. Already she looked better; she wasn't crying out anymore and she was still under his ministrations. After another minute, he let go and Rose opened her eyes. 

"Better?" the Doctor asked softly. 

"Yeah. It still hurts, but much better." 

"What did you do?" Donna whispered. 

"Just suppressed her pain," the Doctor answered, helping Rose to her feet. Donna moved quickly to help on her other side; she could see the worry in the Doctor's eyes. "I want to get you back to the TARDIS and do some tests. Could be an aneurysm, and if so, your life could be in danger. Let's go." 

"Doctor?" Rose was looking up, and she lifted a hand to point at something over their heads. "What is that?" Donna followed the direction Rose was pointing with her eyes. It was the banners. The festive, red banners, which had been covered in Chinese characters, now all said the same thing: BAD WOLF.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Large sections of dialogue and plot in this chapter are adapted from the episode "The Stolen Earth", by Russell T. Davies.

"What does it mean?" Donna asked. The words were everywhere – on every single banner over their heads - BAD WOLF. The Doctor had explained it to her, years and years ago, about how Rose had turned into the Bad Wolf in order to save him from the Daleks, and that she had planted messages throughout time and space to lead Rose back to the Doctor. It had also been integral to getting Rose back from the parallel universe, but Donna had never understood exactly how, only that somehow it had allowed Rose to reach the Doctor in dreams. 

"It _can't_ be," the Doctor muttered as the three of them hurried in the direction of the TARDIS. Donna continued to look around and saw the words everywhere – scrawled on the walls, on posters, on signs hanging from stalls. 

"Why here, why now?" Rose asked. "Did _I_ …?" 

"Let's just get back to the TARDIS," the Doctor said. "Can you run?" 

"Yes." Rose pulled away from them, standing on her own. "I'll be fine, let's go," she said, taking off at a trot which gradually sped to a full out dash. The Doctor kept pace with her, Donna following behind. 

"One trip, no danger," she muttered. "How stupid am I?" She'd never been that fond of all the running she had to do with the Doctor, and now nearing fifty, Donna was not exactly a sprinter. She was still several yards behind when the Doctor and Rose slammed through the doors of the TARDIS. It was here, too, all of the lettering on the outside of the police box replaced by those two terrible words. 

When Donna burst into the TARDIS interior, she was disoriented for a moment by the reddish light that suffused everything. Dimly she heard what sounded like a low bell ringing. The Doctor and Rose were already hard at work at the TARDIS console.

"She wants to take us to Earth!" the Doctor was shouting. 

"So bloody let her!" Rose yelled back at him, just as the dematerialization started. Donna grabbed one of the bars as the TARDIS lurched into the Vortex. Even through her fear and confusion, the fact that Rose was helping to pilot the ship did not escape her notice. 

"Throw the temporal compensation switches!" the Doctor said, and Rose moved several levers from one position to another, frowning in concentration. 

"Doctor, what's that ringing?" Donna asked as she was tossed to one side, the socket of her shoulder straining painfully as she held on. 

"It's the cloister bell," supplied Rose. 

"The what?" No one answered her, and Donna tried again. "What does all this mean?" 

The Doctor spared her a brief glance. "It's the end of the universe." Just at that moment, the TARDIS lurched again and was silent. The ringing had stopped, and the red light had faded, leaving them all bathed in the familiar greenish glow of the console room. All Donna could hear suddenly was the Doctor's heavy breathing. Without a word, he dashed for the door, and the two women followed. 

Donna wasn't sure what horrors she expected to find outside the TARDIS, but what she did find was a completely ordinary street on Earth. A short distance away, a milkman was making a delivery at one of the houses that lined the road. She turned back to look at the TARDIS, and couldn't decide whether to be surprised or not that everything was back to normal. _Police Telephone_ , the placard on the door again read, _Free for Use of Public._

The Doctor was manically swinging about to look in every direction, his hand sweeping through his hair. "It's fine. Everything's fine. Nothing's wrong, all fine. 'Scuse me!" he shouted to the milkman. "What day is it?" 

The man looked at him like he was daft. "Saturday." 

"Saturday, good," the Doctor muttered. "I like Saturdays." 

"Doctor, what's going on?" Rose asked. She still looked pale and drawn, her clothes dirty from being on the ground, but her eyes were clear, focused on the problem at hand. 

"The Bad Wolf – you – could see everything. All timelines, all possibilities of what could be. At first, we thought it was only about getting you back to the Game Station and defeating the Daleks, but years later we learned that she had done so much more than that."

"Bad Wolf Bay," Rose said. 

"Bad Wolf Bay," the Doctor confirmed. "A message that when the time was right, you could cross the Void one more time and get back to me. A tiny little fragment of it, still inside your mind, completely harmless, completely dormant, but making it possible for you to reach across the Void into my and Jack's dreams." 

"And now this, at the market?" 

"Another message. The Bad Wolf saw something in our future, something terrible, and she saw us today, in that marketplace. She left us another message, and she screamed it at us. No scattered bits of graffiti, this. Bad Wolf everywhere we looked, even on the TARDIS. Powerful enough to twinge that little fragment inside your head," the Doctor added, touching Rose's temple briefly. 

"That's why she got the headache?" Donna asked. 

"Must be." His hand when into his hair again. "And the TARDIS felt it too, it knew that something very, very bad was coming. The cloister bell doesn't ring unless it's a bad of apocalyptic proportions." He looked around again at the peaceful street. "But what is it?" He ran back into the TARDIS, and again his companions followed him. 

The Doctor was at the console monitor, typing frantically and frowning. Donna touched Rose's elbow gently. "How's your head?" 

"There's still a dull ache, but I can live with it." She shook her head as if to clear it. "I can't believe it. After all these years, what happened on the Game Station is still touching our lives." 

"It's good though, yeah? If it warned us that something is coming, and we can get ready for it -" 

Suddenly, a low boom that Donna felt in her belly and she realized that she'd fallen to the floor. Struggling up, wincing at pain in her hands and knees, she saw Rose was also picking herself up from the floor, and the Doctor was scrabbling up from where he had grabbed hold of the console. 

"What the hell was that?!" 

"Wasn't us," the Doctor said as he ran down the ramp, "it came from outside." Swinging the door open wide, the Doctor started to step out, but Rose was there and she caught him, pulling him back again. Donna joined them at the doorway. 

She was looking at nothing but black, empty space – dusty swirls of gas and a few small, lonely rocks tumbled past. 

"But ... we're in space." Donna said unnecessarily, the memory of standing in this spot for the very first time, panicked and in her wedding dress, hitting her in the gut. "How did that happen, what did you do?" 

The Doctor ran back to the console, slamming switches around and looking at the monitor again. "We haven't moved, we're fixed." He raked his hand through his hair again. "It can't have! No!" 

"What?" Rose said, looking between him and the empty space outside. 

"The TARDIS is still in the same place, but the Earth has gone." 

Donna felt a stab of fear. "What do you mean, _'gone'_?" 

"The entire planet, it's gone! It's been taken, or moved. The rest of the solar system is here," he said, focused on the monitor. "All the other planets, the moons, the sun …" 

Rose carefully closed the doors to the TARDIS, her movements precise and controlled. Donna thought later that it was like she had donned some psychological armor, like she was preparing herself for battle. "Doctor," she said in a low voice, "if the Earth's been moved, then they've lost the sun. They may not even be able to sustain an atmosphere." 

"Oh my god," Donna gasped, walking over on numb legs and collapsing on the jump seat. "What about Phil? And my Mum? They're dead, aren't they? Are they dead?" 

The Doctor winced, glancing at her quickly. "I don't know, Donna, I just don't know, I'm sorry, I don't know..." 

"There's no reason to think like that yet, Donna," said Rose, sitting next to her and taking her hand. "We don't have enough information yet." 

"That's my family. My whole world." 

"There's no readings," the Doctor was saying. "Nothing, not a trace. Not even a whisper. Ohh, that's fearsome technology." 

"So what do we do?" Rose asked, still holding on to Donna's hand. 

The Doctor turned to look at them. "We've got to get help." 

Donna shivered at the look on his face. "Where from?" 

"Ladies, I'm taking you to the Shadow Proclamation. Hold tight!" With that, he threw a lever and the TARDIS lurched again. This time, Rose stayed at Donna's side while the Doctor piloted the ship alone. The trip felt like it took much longer than usual, even though it was not terribly bumpy. When they finally stopped, the Doctor turned to them again, a determined expression on his face. "We're here." 

"Let me get this straight," Rose said. "The Shadow Proclamation is a _place_?" 

"No, it's the police. Outer space police." 

"But I thought it was ... do they know that 'proclamation' means, like, an announcement or something?" 

He waved her comment away, pulling on his coat and flipping down the collar. "It was originally the name for their series of laws, became the name for the organization itself. Come on - if anyone can help, they can." 

Donna followed them out of the TARDIS into an antiseptic room; it was all white walls and cool lighting. Staring at them were several ... well, space-rhinos was the only word she could come up with to describe them. Space rhinos with guns trained on the three of them. They raised their hands in the air. 

"Sco! Bo Tro! No! Flo! Jo! Ko! Fo! To! Do!" shouted the one unhelmeted rhino. 

Without missing a beat, the Doctor responded. "No! Bo! Ho! Sho! Ko! Ro! To! So! Bo Ko Do Zo Go Bo Fo Po Jo!" The Judoon lower their guns. "Mo Ho," the Doctor said with a nod. 

Donna leaned over to Rose. "Why isn't the TARDIS translating? And what are those things?" 

Rose had lowered her hands, seemingly assured that the danger was over. "They're Judoon, they're a mercenary police force. Remember? Martha and the hospital on the moon?" The Judoon were leading the way to another part of the building. "As to the TARDIS, the Doctor told me once that their language doesn't have grammar as such, and it makes it almost impossible to translate properly. So the TARDIS doesn't bother. Either that," she said, smirking, "or she just thinks it's hilarious to hear the Doctor speaking Judoon." 

Donna laughed quietly. "She's not wrong." 

They were led into a larger room, just as white as everything else. From behind a large desk stood an albino woman with piercing, red eyes. She wore a floor-length, black dress which made her skin fairly glow in comparison. "I am one of the Shadow Architects," she intoned. "And who, may I ask, are you?" The Judoon lined the wall behind them. 

"Hello, I'm the Doctor," he said, "I'm sorry, but I don't have a lot of time to spend on pleasantries. We came to ask for your help, for the help of the Shadow Proclamation. You see, an entire planet, Sol 3, has disappeared out of space. Literally, one minute it was there, the next, nothing. Seems the kind of thing that falls under your jurisdiction." 

She narrowed her eyes. "You are unlike anything I've ever perceived before. _What are you?_ " 

He squared his shoulders, facing off against her. "I'm a Time Lord." 

Her frightening eyes widened. "But Time Lords are the stuff of legend. They belong in the myths and whispers of the Higher Species. You cannot properly exist." 

The Doctor rolled his eyes in exasperation like he'd heard all of this before. "Yeah, more to the point, I've got a missing planet!" 

"Then you're not as wise as the stories would say. The picture is far bigger than you imagine. The whole universe is in outrage, Doctor; twenty-four worlds have been taken from the sky." 

"How many?" Rose asked. 

The Doctor was already dashing around to the desk, needlessly hopping over a small seat in his path. "Which ones? Show me!" He pulled his specs out and put them on.

The Architect pressed a button. "The locations range far and wide. But all disappeared at the exact same moment, leaving no trace." 

The Doctor muttered as he scrolled through the data. "Callufrax Minor. Jahoo. Shallacatop. Woman Wept. Clom? Clom's gone!" 

Rose snorted. "Who'd want Clom?" 

"All different sizes, some populated, some not, but all unconnected." 

"What about Pyrovillia?" Donna interjected. 

The Shadow Architect glared at her. "Who is this female?" 

Donna bristled and drew herself up as tall as she could. "Donna, I'm a Human Being. Maybe not the stuff of legend, but every bit as important as Time Lords, thank you." She turned to the Doctor, who was smiling at her with pride. "Years and years ago, in Pompeii, whatshisname said Pyrovillia had gone missing." 

The Judoon who seemed to be the leader stomped forward. "Pyrovillia is cold case. Not relevant!" 

"How d'you mean, cold case?" Rose asked, frowning. 

"The planet Pyrovillia can't be part of this," the Shadow Architect said, "it disappeared over two thousand years ago-" 

Donna was shaking her head. "Yeah, but hold on, there was the Adipose Breeding Planet too, remember? That supernanny said it was lost." 

The Doctor jumped, his hand running through his hair. "That's it! Donna! Brilliant! Planets are being taken out of time as well as space." He stabbed a few buttons on the console. "Let's put this into 3-D ..." 

In front of the desk, floating in mid-air, a hologram of twenty-four planets appeared. "Now, if we add Pyrovillia," the Doctor muttered, "and then Adipose III, then ..." Two more planets appeared in the hologram. "There's something missing. Where else, where else? Lost, lost, lost ..." 

"Oh!" Rose shouted, "Remember Dee Dee, we met her on Midnight? She had been studying something about a missing moon." 

"The Lost Moon of Poosh!" the Doctor yelled, hitting more keys. A small moon appeared in the hologram, and then suddenly the planets rearranged themselves with a quick spin, then settled into a new, moving pattern. 

The Shadow Architect gasped. "What did you do?" 

The Doctor was focused on the hologram. "Nothing. They rearranged themselves into the optimum pattern. Ohh, but look at that! Twenty-seven planets in perfect balance. Come on, that _is_ gorgeous." 

Donna huffed. "Oi, don't get all Spaceman, what does it _mean_?" 

"All those worlds fit together like pieces of an engine. It's like a powerhouse! But what for?" 

"Who could design such a thing?" asked the Shadow Architect. 

"Someone tried to move the Earth once before. Long time ago. But it can't be ..." After a moment of thought, the Doctor shook off the reverie and rushed back to the desk. 

 

*** 

 

It had been almost half an hour. Rose looked over at the Doctor, where he was hunched over the terminal, hard at work, conferring occasionally with the Shadow Architect. The Judoon still stood in the back of the room, on guard. Donna had sunk onto one of the low seats and put her head in her hands, while Rose had wandered over to a wide, glass staircase and sat on the steps. She knew she should probably be comforting Donna, who had potentially lost so much, but she couldn't muster the energy to stand up and offer herself as a shoulder to cry on. Between the constant tension with the Doctor, collapsing in that market with the worst headache she could imagine, and the return of Bad Wolf, Rose was spent. An occasional tear leaked out of her eye and she wiped absently at it. She wondered if she should be perversely grateful for the distraction from her usual problems that this offered. 

It started at the very edge of her awareness, a sound so low that if asked, Rose probably wouldn't have been able to say that she heard it. Rose stared straight ahead, letting her eyes unfocus, her elbows resting on her knees. At some point, she became consciously aware of the sound - a heartbeat, thrumming along at a steady pace. _Thumpthump ... Thumpthump._ A single heartbeat, louder and louder, staying slow even as Rose felt her own heartbeat speed up. A sense of creeping inevitability stole over her. Something was coming. _Thumpthump ... Thumpthump_.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Large sections of dialogue and plot in this chapter are adapted from the episode "The Stolen Earth", by Russell T. Davies.

"You need sustenance." 

Rose started out of her trance and shook her head, trying to clear the fog. The heartbeat was suddenly gone - had she imagined it? Looking up, she saw another albino woman, this one younger and more humbly dressed than the Architect still working with the Doctor. "What?" 

"Take the water, it purifies." She held out a china bowl. 

"Thanks," Rose responded, accepting the bowl. From the corner of her eye, she could see Donna already drinking from one of her own. 

The servant continued to stare at her, her pink eyes wide with something akin to fear. "You were lost ... in another universe," she whispered. 

"How d'you know that?" 

"You are something new," the servant continued as if Rose had not spoken. 

Rose chuckled without humour. "I wish. Lately I've been feeling a bit too much like I'm something old." 

"I'm so sorry for your loss." 

Rose frowned. "You mean Earth? Yeah, my home planet-" 

"I mean the loss that is yet to come," the servant gasped, looking more and more terrified. "God save you." Before Rose could say anything else, the woman fled the room. 

"Donna!" the Doctor called, and Rose looked over at him. He was rubbing the bridge of his nose, his specs resting on his fingers. "Come on, think. Earth! There must've been some sort of warning, was there anything happening? Like, electrical storms? Freak weather? Patterns in the sky?" 

"Well how should I know?" Donna snapped, then she relented. "Um... not really, don't think so." 

The Doctor turned away, frustrated, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Okay, never mind-" 

"Although..." Donna added, standing up. "There was the bees disappearing." 

"The bees disappearing," the Doctor said in a dismissive tone. Rose wondered why he bothered to ask if he wasn't going to entertain any and all ideas. "The bees disappearing," he continued, musing. Then he jumped, snapping his fingers. "The bees disappearing!" He lept around the desk to the terminal, his coat flapping behind him, and began frantically typing again. Donna followed quickly behind him, and Rose stood to join them. 

"How is that significant?" asked the Shadow Architect. 

"We've got these insects on Earth," Donna said, "they were starting to disappear. Some people said it was pollution, or mobile phone signals -" 

"Or," the Doctor interrupted, his index finger raised in a dramatic pose, "they were going back home!" Rose approached and stood at his side. 

"Back home where?" Rose asked. 

"The planet Melissa Majoria!" the Doctor proclaimed, grinning at her.

Donna's eyes boggled. "Are you saying bees are aliens?" 

"Don't be so daft, not all of them." 

Rose started to see where he might be going with this line of thinking. "So you're saying, if the bees felt something coming, some sort of danger ..." 

"And escaped... " the Doctor finished. Then he slapped his forehead. "Tandocca!" 

"The Tandocca Scale!" said the Shadow Architect, clearly impressed. 

"The Tandocca Scale is a series of wavelengths used as a carrier signal by Migrant Bees," the Doctor explained as he typed. "Infinitely small! No wonder we didn't see it, it's like looking for a speck of cinnamon in the Sahara, but look -" Everyone looked at the map of space on the computer terminal, and Rose could just make out tiny, faint, dust-like trails on the screen. "There it is. The Tandocca trail. The transmat that moved the planets was using the same wavelength, we can follow the path!" 

"And find the Earth! Well come on then, stop talking and do it!" shouted Donna as they all ran toward the TARDIS. 

"I am!" The Doctor yelled back as they ran around the console. Rose was thrilled - they had something to do, they would save the Earth. The Doctor couldn't possibly continue to feel so much self-loathing if he saved six billion people. "We're a bit late, the signal's scattered," he said happily. "But it's a start!" Running back down the ramp, he ducked his head out of the TARDIS. Rose stood next to him, hidden by the closed half of the door. "I've got a blip, just a blip," he said, presumably to the Shadow Architect. "But it's definitely a blip!" 

"Then according to the strictures of the Shadow Proclamation, I will have to seize your transport and your technology," came the creepy woman's response. _No,_ Rose thought, her happiness draining away. 

The Doctor affected an innocent demeanor, but Rose could see his back stiffen and his knuckles go white as he clenched the door frame. "Oh, really, what for?" 

"The planets were stolen with hostile intent. We are declaring war, Doctor, right across the universe, and you will lead us into battle!" 

After what UNIT had done to him, using him, twisting his love and loyalty to their own ends, the thought that the Shadow Proclamation might try to do the same thing made Rose's heart sink. "Right, yes, course I will," the Doctor said, still appearing completely calm to anyone who didn't know him as well as she did. "I'll just go and... get you the key... " He stepped backwards and gently closed the door, immediately running back toward the console, the set of his jaw betraying his anger. After a few quick adjustments he slammed the dematerialization lever, and the TARDIS took them away from the Shadow Proclamation. 

"I think we may have made a serious enemy there, Doctor," Rose said as she joined him at the controls. 

"Bah." He waved his hand dismissively. "It'll be all right. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Now!" he said, clapping his hands together, "to follow the bread crumbs. Rose, stand over by the navigation stabilizer and let's make this as smooth a ride as possible, shall we?" 

 

*** 

 

Donna watched them follow the trail for close to an hour. Whatever problems the Doctor and Rose might be having, she decided, it didn't seem to affect the way they worked together. He called out commands and she made adjustments to the wheel she was operating on the console. They made an excellent team, there was no doubt about that. She tried not to think about Phil, about what might be happening to him right now - about whether he was alive. She honestly couldn't decide if she was glad she was on the TARDIS or not. If he had died, how unfair was it that she had been saved, out of everyone else? 

"What's wrong?" she heard Rose ask, and Donna looked up at them. The Doctor was frowning, staring at the monitor and scratching the back of his neck. "It's stopped." 

"We've stopped?" Donna asked. "Is that good or bad?" 

"What d'you mean? Where are we?" This from Rose. 

The Doctor was reading the scanner, and his expression held something like awe. "The Medusa Cascade. I came here when I was just a kid, ninety years old. It was the centre of a rift in time and space ..." 

"But where's the twenty-seven planets?" Rose asked, looking at the monitor herself. 

"Nowhere," he said. "The Tandocca trail stops dead. End of the line." 

Donna thought she might collapse to the floor. "So what do we do?" The Doctor just stared straight ahead, looking lost. "Doctor? What do we do? Don't do this to me, not now. Tell me, what are we gonna do?" He didn't answer her. "You never give up. Doctor, think of something! Please." 

The Doctor just stepped back against the rail, while Rose approached him cautiously. Donna watched, still feeling panicky - how could she be so calm? "I know it seems like there's no solution, but what is it you always tell me?" Rose asked. "There's always a solution, we just have to find it, yeah? I know you better than anyone in the universe, and you can do anything. Anything you set your mind to. Doctor?" 

 

*** 

 

Martha Jones, UNIT medical officer, opened her eyes and winced. She was lying on the floor, her cheek pressed against the hard wood floor of the modern New York office building where she had spent more time in the last months than she liked to admit. Standing up, she tried to survey the damage. Desks and chairs were upended, computers and papers littering the floor. Everyone was babbling, trying to right themselves and feeling for injuries. "What was that?" she rasped, coughing. "Some sort of earthquake, or..? Anyone hurt?" she added in a louder voice. No one seemed to be seriously injured, so Martha moved on to the next item on her mental checklist. They appeared to be on emergency power, so they would need to find out how localized the outage was and try to get primary electricity back online as quickly as possible. 

"Oh my god," someone gasped from the window. Martha looked over at where people had started to gather. 

"What's wrong?" 

A young officer named Suzanne turned to her. "Martha, come look out the window. Look at the sky!" 

"Why, what is it?" She climbed over a desk to get to the wall of windows. "And why is it so dark out there?" Pressing herself against the glass and looking up, Martha gasped. She was looking at an entirely alien sky, filled with unfamiliar planets and moons. As many alien skies as Martha Jones had once seen, it did nothing to prepare her for what she was looking at now. "It can't be ..." 

Her first thought was of a hospital transported to the moon, and she wondered if the same thing had happened. Looking down at the ground below, it looked like the same New York City street as always. If they had been transported somewhere, it was more than just the UNIT building. With a shock of fear, Martha thought of her family. Stepping into the corner, she pulled out her mobile phone and hit the key that would call home. 

"Martha!" came the breathless voice of Tom, her husband, after only two rings. "Are you all right? What's happened?" 

"Never mind that, the kids?" 

"They're fine, they think it's exciting, think it was an earthquake." Martha could faintly hear the squealing of her two children as they careened around the posh apartment she and Tom had bought in Manhattan the previous year. "I haven't let them see the sky." 

"So you're seeing the same thing that we're seeing here?" 

"If you mean a bunch of weird planets or whatever, then yes. And it's night. Martha, what's happened? What is UNIT saying?" 

Martha looked around at the disarray. Her colleagues were righting everything, but the overriding atmosphere was still one of chaos. "We're still trying to figure it out, Tom. I don't know how widespread the effect is yet." 

"What about the Doctor?" 

"I'm going to call him next, believe me. Just, stay indoors and I'll call you back in a few minutes, okay?" 

"I don't suppose there's any point in asking you to come home?" Tom asked.

"I would like nothing better. I'll call back soon, I promise. I love you." 

"Love you too, Martha. Be safe." She clicked off and immediately phoned the number that she should be able to reach no matter where either of them were. It rang and rang and rang, and no one answered. 

After she'd called for the fifth time, the computer monitors and work stations started to flicker to life. The flurry of activity became more focused, now that people had something to occupy their fingers. General Sanchez, the commander of this UNIT base, stalked in, checked the readouts, and began giving orders. "We're tracking two hundred objects, Earthbound trajectory - Geneva is calling a Code Red! Everyone to battle positions! Dr. Jones, if you're not too busy -" 

Martha still held the mobile to her ear. "Trying to phone the Doctor, sir, but there's no signal. This number calls anywhere in the universe, it never breaks down. They must be blocking it, whoever 'they' are." 

"We're about to find out. They're coming into orbit." 

Martha was suddenly struck with another thought. If she couldn't reach the Doctor, there was one other person who might be able to. She hit a few more keys on her mobile and switched to using her bluetooth headset. 

She almost sobbed with relief when she heard his voice come over the line. "Martha Jones!" Jack boomed into her ear. "Tell me you put something in my drink!" 

"No such luck." She sighed. "And if you're seeing there what we're seeing here, then the effect is planetwide."

"Seems to be, based on our readings."

"Have you heard from the Doctor?" Martha asked.

"Not a word. How's UNIT dealing with this?" When Martha had returned to work after her second child was born, it was to UNIT and not to Torchwood; of the two, she had thought UNIT would be safer. The war with the Ixari had disproved that theory, although New York hadn't been the hardest hit American city, and Martha had escaped the worst of the conflict. Today, seemingly nowhere was safe. "And what are you doing for them now, anyway?"

"I've been promoted," Martha said. "Medical Director on Project Indigo." 

"Hey, did you get that thing working?" 

Martha smirked. "Indigo's top secret, no one's supposed to know about it." 

"Well, I met this soldier in a bar, long story." Jack said, and she could almost hear his lecherous grin. 

"We've got an incoming transmission, sir," shouted an officer. 

The General wheeled around. "Well, let's hear it, soldier." 

The speakers crackled to life, and when an audible pattern emerged from the static, Martha almost fell to her knees. _Dear god, my family_ , was all she could think as the one word reverberated throughout the room. _"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

There was a loud boom, and the whole roof shook, dropping chunks of masonry onto their heads. Chaos ensued; Jack was saying something into her ear, but Martha couldn't make it out over the other noises. Alarms started to go off, and General Sanchez was shouting. "Battle stations! Geneva is declaring Ultimate Code Red! Ladies and gentlemen, we are at war!" Martha hurried to assist with the wounded. 

"Martha, you've got to get out of there!" she heard from Jack. "Get as far away from UNIT as you can!" 

"I can't Jack, I've got a job to do -" 

"They're targeting military bases, and you know you'll be next on the list!" 

Martha looked up and saw General Sanchez and another soldier above her. "Dr. Jones. You'll come with me. Project Indigo is being activated. Quick march!" They didn't wait for her to comply; she was bodily lifted to a standing position and escorted out of the control room. 

"But we can't use Project Indigo," Martha protested as she was taken down a long corridor. "It hasn't been tested, sir, we don't even know if it works." They came to a big, bank vault-like steel door. The soldier entered a code and swung it open to reveal another corridor, this time with a row of cabinets. Another code, and a hand imprint from the General, and the cabinet was opened to reveal a harness, covered with metal clips and electronics. 

"Put it on, Dr. Jones," said the General. 

The signal was weak, but Martha could still hear Jack in her ear. "Martha, I'm telling you, don't use Project Indigo, it's not safe -" 

Martha ignored him, already hauling it on the harness and strapping it up. "But why me?" 

"You're our only hope of finding the Doctor. But failing that..." His voice dropped, "If no help is coming ... then with the power invested in me by the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, I authorise you to take this." He pulled a small black square on a chain from his pocket. "The Osterhagen Key." 

Martha stared at him in horror. "I can't take that, sir." 

"You know what to do. For the sake of the Human Race." With shaking hands, Martha accepted the key. 

There was a deafening explosion at the far end of the corridor as the steel door blew open. Martha looked at the General and saw his doom written in his eyes. He saluted her. "Doctor Jones. Good luck." 

Jack was shouting at her. "Martha, don't do it! Don't!" 

She was dead either way, probably, but if she stayed here, it was an absolute certainty. She could hear the Daleks coming. At least with the Indigo harness, there was a small probability of survival. With a last thought of Tom and her children, she prepared to pull the ripcords on the harness. "Bye, Jack." 

 

***

 

Phil crouched at the front window in his darkened house. As he watched, two of the metal creatures herded a group of frightened Londoners down the road. They didn't seem to be taking anyone from his street, but the sight outside his window, coupled with the screams and explosions he could hear occasionally, indicated that many were not so lucky. He berated himself as a coward, hiding the way he was, but he figured running outside in a vain attempt to save anyone would only get him killed, and what good would that do?

He hit redial on his mobile again. Donna had a phone modified by the Doctor, he should be able to reach her regardless of where or when she was. So why wasn't she answering? When the sky had turned dark and the city invaded, Phil had hoped briefly that Donna was out of harm's way, in the TARDIS. But that was unlikely; knowing the Doctor, Donna was probably at the centre of the danger.

Phil sat on the floor under the window, his head in his hands. _Donna, please come home. Please be safe._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Large sections of dialogue and plot in this chapter are adapted from the episode "The Stolen Earth", by Russell T. Davies.

"Mummy!" 

Before Martha could open her eyes, she felt the soft little body of her daughter Sophie slam into her. Reflexively, she reached out and hugged the four-year-old to her, and then looked to see that she was in the foyer of her own apartment. She sat up, fighting back nausea and squinting. "I'm here, baby, I'm here." 

" _Martha?_ Oh my God." Then Tom was there, and her seven-year-old Michael, and she felt so relieved to be with her family that for a moment she forgot everything else and just clung to them. "How on Earth did you get here?" 

Martha struggled to her feet. "Teleport, adapted from Sontaran technology. Don't know how it put me here, except ... well, maybe this is where I wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world." She touched Tom's cheek affectionately, then hugged her kids again. "Why don't you both go get a snack from the kitchen, I need to talk to your daddy for a minute." 

They trotted off, and Tom's expression changed from relief to fear. "What is it?" 

Martha ran to look out the window. She could see the Dalek ships in the distance and feel the occasional tremor from their weapons, but this block was, for the moment, unaffected. She turned back to Tom. "Daleks." 

"Dear God." 

"That about sums it up." 

"We need to get the kids out of the city," Tom said. 

"I bet all of Manhattan is thinking that right now. It'll be chaos on the roads." 

"I take it that teleport can only carry you?" 

Martha laughed mirthlessly. "To be honest, I was afraid it wouldn't even do that. UNIT headquarters was under attack. They sent me away, as the only hope to get in touch with the Doctor. Also, to ... well." The Osterhagen key was not something she wanted to talk about with her husband. "But I've been trying to call him, and I ..." A beeping coming from their home computer interrupted her. "What's that, one of the kid's games?" 

Tom shook his head. "I don't think so." They both approached the computer, and were surprised to see the screen switch on and fill with static. She thought she could make out voices, electronically garbled, but definitely voices. 

"Hello?" Martha said. The view gradually cleared, revealing that the screen was split into four separate video feeds. The first one that Martha could make out was- 

"Martha Jones!" Jack cried happily. "You made it, you're alive! Martha, where are you?" 

"I guess Project Indigo was more clever than we thought. One second I was in the UNIT base, the next second - maybe Indigo tapped into my mind, because I ended up at home. Then all of a sudden, it's like the computer activated itself." 

"It did. That was me," said an older woman in one of the frames. She held up her ID. "Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister." 

"Yes, I know who you are," Martha said, suppressing a smile and glancing at Tom, who had sat down next to her. "But how did you find me?"

"This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Subwave Network," said Harriet. "A sentient piece of software programmed to seek out anyone and everyone who can help to contact the Doctor." 

The fourth frame was occupied by Sarah Jane Smith's son Luke, who was now a man in his late twenties. "What if the Daleks can hear us?" he asked.

"No, that's the beauty of the Subwave, it's undetectable." It had been a long time since Harriet Jones had been Prime Minister, but she seemed as strong as ever. 

"What, and you invented it?" Luke asked.

"I developed it. It was created by the Mr. Copper Foundation." 

"Yeah, well what we need right now is a weapon!" Jack said. "Martha, back there at UNIT, what did they give you, what was that key thing?" 

Martha glanced at Tom and sucked in a breath. "The Osterhagen Key." 

"That's not to be used, Dr. Jones. Not under any circumstances," Harriet said severely. "Forget the key, that's an order. All we need is the Doctor." 

Martha noticed that another woman had joined them, standing at Luke's side. It had been several years, but she recognized Sarah Jane, who started to speak. "Excuse me, Harriet, but ... thing is, if you're looking for the Doctor ... didn't he depose you?" 

"He did. And I've spent a long time wondering about that, whether I was wrong. But I stand by my actions, to this day. Because I knew this would happen. I knew, one day, the Earth would be in danger, and the Doctor would fail to appear. I told him so myself, and he didn't listen." 

"But I've been trying to find him," Martha interjected. "The Doctor's got a phone, on the TARDIS, but I can't get through."

"I can't get Rose either," Jack said. Luke and Sarah Jane reported the same.

"That's why we need the Subwave," Harriet said. "To bring us together, and combine forces. The Doctor's secret army." 

After a flurry of planning, they decided to use the technologies available to them to boost the signal. "Harriet," Luke said, "When we start transmitting, the Subwave Network is going to become visible to the Daleks." 

Harriet Jones was unfazed. "Indeed, and they will trace it back to me. But my life doesn't matter, not if it saves the Earth. People are dying out there, on the streets. That's enough talk. Let's begin!" 

 

*** 

 

The Doctor continued to lean against one of the coral supports, his feet rooted to the floor grating. "You're wrong. I can't do _anything_. Nor should I, I'm not a god." Rose's face fell. This was certainly something he could do, he thought bitterly. He could disappoint his wife. 

"I just mean ... if we work together, we can figure this out, yeah? Like we have so many other things. Together." She squeezed his hand, and his hearts clenched. 

"Together," he rasped. He loved her so much that it sometimes felt like it was tearing him to pieces. This would all be much easier if he didn't love her so damn much. 

Rose threw herself into his arms and he clutched at her back, his eyes shut tight. One word. All it had taken to comfort her was one word, that's how much faith she had in him, even after everything. The truth of it was that he hadn't the faintest idea what to do. 

When he first heard the sound, he felt a flash of annoyance, followed quickly by confusion. _Bip-bip-bip..._ What _was_ that? 

Rose ran for the console. "It's the phone!" she shouted, grabbing for it. "Hello?" She paused, looking at the Doctor. "It's just beeping." 

He snapped his fingers quickly and Rose handed the mobile over. "It's a signal! Someone's trying to get in touch with us!" 

"Can we follow it?" Donna asked. 

The Doctor grinned his best manic grin. "Just watch me!" He jumped for the controls, Rose moving to assist him as she always did now. "Got it! Locking on!" A huge jolt shook all of them, but they held on to the console. Rose whooped, and it made him laugh. After a few seconds of this extremely rough ride, the console sparked in several places, threatening to set the room ablaze. "We're travelling into a time bubble! One second in the future! The phone call's pulling us through!" If possible, things got even bumpier, and a small fire did start under the grated floor. They were almost through. "Three! Two! _One!_ " 

_"Come onnnnnn!"_ Donna shouted. 

Gradually calm was restored, and the ride evened out. The Doctor took a fire extinguisher to a couple of small flare-ups while Rose and Donna stared at the scanner. 

"Twenty-seven planets!" Rose crowed. 

"And there's the Earth!" Donna said, pointing to the screen. "Why couldn't we see them?" 

The Doctor walked back over to them. "The entire Medusa Cascade has been put a second out of sync with the rest of the universe. Perfect hiding place, a tiny little pocket of time. But we found them!" The scanner began to fizz with static. "What's this? Hold on. Some sort of Subwave Network..." He turned a few knobs to tune the signal, and finally a video feed, split into four parts, appeared. 

"Where the hell have you been?" Jack yelled. Everyone began shouting at once - Jack, Martha and Tom, Sarah Jane and Luke, and even with his superior brain the Doctor couldn't make out what they were saying. He was just so _relieved_ to see all of them. 

"Aren't they brilliant?" he said proudly. 

"It's like an outer space Facebook," Donna commented. Just as suddenly, they lost the picture and audio, leaving nothing but more fizzing static. "We've lost them!" 

The Doctor hit the top of the monitor. "No, there's another signal coming through. There's someone else out there. Hello? Can you hear me?" 

The voice that responded froze the blood in his veins. The Doctor didn't often experience terror, but here it was, constricting his hearts. "Doctor. Your voice is different. And yet, its arrogance is unchanged." The video resolved, showing the face of his nightmares. A single, blue eye glared out from the forehead of Davros' withered face. The Doctor was vaguely aware of both women recoiling from the sight. "Welcome to my new Empire, Doctor. It is only fitting that you should bear witness to the resurrection and the triumph of Davros, lord and creator of the Dalek Race!" 

He felt Rose's warm fingers thread with his own. "Doctor? It's all right. We're in the TARDIS. We're safe." 

Her words calmed him enough that he was able to speak. "But you were destroyed in the very first year of the Time War. At the Gates of Elysium. I saw your command ship fly into the jaws of the Nightmare Child. I tried to save you." 

"But it took one stronger than you," Davros said. "Dalek Caan himself." 

In the background of the video image the Doctor could just make out what looked like a broken Dalek, wiggling like some kind of Lovecraftian horror. "I flew into the wild and fire, I danced and died a thousand times." Its voice was high and tremulous. 

"Emergency Temporal Shift took him back into the Time War itself," Davros explained. 

"But that's impossible!" the Doctor protested. "The entire war is timelocked!" 

"And yet he succeeded. Oh, it cost him his mind. But imagine! A single, simple Dalek succeeded where Emperors and Time Lords failed. A testament, don't you think, to my remarkable creations?" 

"And you made a new race of Daleks?" _They always survive while I lose everything._

"I gave myself to them. Quite literally." Davros opened his tunic, revealing unprotected ribs and organs beneath. "Each one grown from a cell of my own body. New Daleks. True Daleks. I have my children, Doctor; what do you have, now?" 

He spoke through clenched teeth. "After all this time, after everything we saw, after everything we lost, I have only one thing to say to you." He felt mad and reckless. What hope was there now? "Bye!" he shouted, slamming down a lever that sent them spinning toward Earth. 

 

*** 

 

Rose followed the Doctor out of the TARDIS onto a darkened London street, Donna bringing up the rear and shutting the door behind them. "Creator of the Daleks, huh?" she said. 

The Doctor glanced back at her, then at the deserted streets around them. "Yeah." Cars were abandoned in the middle of the street, a bicycle lay on its side near where they stood, one wheel lazily spinning. 

"It's like a ghost town," Donna whispered. Rose knew she must be terrified for what had become of her husband. 

"They must be taking the people," the Doctor said, and Rose turned back to face him. "We've got to think. Whatever Davros is doing, it may be worse than anything we've ever dealt with. Not just bringing harm to the Earth, or to these twenty-seven planets, but to the entire universe. And if the entire universe is in danger, if all worlds are in danger ... " His eyes focused way off in the distance. "Then, just for example, the walls between universes might be breaking down." 

Rose frowned. "What do you mean?" 

The Doctor smiled a small smile and nodded toward something behind her. "See for yourself." 

Rose swung around and looked down the deserted street. Far away she saw two people. One, a dark-skinned man in a black jacket; the other, an older woman with bright, bleached hair. Both of them achingly familiar. "Mum ...?" 

_"Rose!"_ They started to run toward her, and without another thought, Rose began to run as fast as she could toward them. It was Mickey and her mum, two people she hadn't seen in twelve years. Two people she thought she'd never see again for as long as she lived. Her _mum._ Rose let out a gasping sob as she ran. 

"Rose, there could be Daleks, watch out!" the Doctor called from where he was running only a few steps behind her. Rose could only think of getting to her mother as quickly as she could. She could see her face now, smiling, crying ... She was almost there ... 

_"EXTERMINATE!"_ Rose swung her head around, trying to backpedal as she saw the terrible shape of a Dalek round the corner and aim directly at her. 

There was a green flash and she was falling, hitting the street on her back. The heavy shape of the Doctor fell on top of her, his shoulder colliding painfully with her sternum. Rose gasped for breath, wondering what death by extermination was supposed to feel like. She'd never thought to ask Jack. 

_"You go to hell, pepper pot!"_ screamed what could only have been her mother, and there was another flash and an explosion. The Doctor rolled off of her, and Rose struggled to sit up. Why wasn't she dead? You didn't get wounded if a Dalek hit you, you died. Which meant- 

She looked at the Doctor, lying on the ground next to her. His eyes were closed. _No,_ she thought. _Nonononono._

Suddenly he gasped in a breath, coughing and writhing on the pavement. Rose knelt at his side, cradling his head. "I've got you, it missed, look, I'm here, Doctor, look, it's me." 

He opened his eyes and she could tell he was in agony, his back arching off the ground. Still, he managed to smile at her, and it nearly broke her heart. "Rose ..." 

"Hi." 

"Saved you ... Rose, I love ..." He was wracked with another spasm of pain, his teeth clacking together and his eyes squeezing shut. 

"Don't die, oh my God, don't die," she gasped, still holding his head, her other hand on his chest. She was vaguely aware of her vision starting to narrow. 

Then there was a flurry of people around them and Rose remembered to take a breath. Donna was there and ... "Get him into the TARDIS, quick!" Was that Jack? Rose helped them struggle with the Doctor, now seemingly unconscious, as they hurried back to the TARDIS. _My fault,_ she thought, _This is all my fault. Again._

Time seemed to dilate; the next thing Rose was aware of was helping to lower the Doctor's shuddering body to the grated floor of the console room. He was all she could see, and when his eyelids fluttered again, she felt a moment of relief. Maybe he would be okay. Maybe ... 

He held up his left hand in front of his face. It was glowing. 

"Rose!" Jack was shouting at her. "You need to step back! He's dying, and you know what happens next." 

She felt a tear slide down her nose. "But he can't, not now." 

"It's starting," the Doctor said, meeting her eyes. "I'm sorry." He convulsed again. "My ring ..." he said, looking again at his hand. "You should take it off, it won't fit ... new fingers." 

Rose choked back a sob and pulled the Doctor's wedding ring off his trembling hand. "Then we'll get it resized. I promise, all we have to do is get it resized." She let Jack pull her away, tears flowing freely down her face now. "I love you." 

When the flash of gold came, Rose's eyes shut tight. She knew that she had looked at that face she loved so much for the last time.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Large sections of dialogue and plot in this chapter are adapted from the episode "Journey's End", by Russell T. Davies.
> 
> Because Still Lost was written before "Journey's End" aired, Jackie has a daughter named Lily, not a son named Tony.

The regeneration energy suffused him, propelling him to his feet. This would be the end of his marriage, he thought. He was barely managing to hold on to Rose as it was, and now, with a new face and new personality, she'd probably just decide that she'd had enough. He'd lose her. Unless ... 

He felt his injuries healing, the ruined cells replaced by healthy ones. Once that was done, the regeneration would take its course and he would change. The only way to stop it would be to siphon the regeneration energy off onto someone else, and that would kill a human, even if it worked. He smiled. But he just happened to have an alternative. Putting his two hands together, he directed the energy at the hand under the console. 

As the last of the energy left him, he staggered. _It worked,_ he thought jubilantly. He had stayed the same man for _her_. "Now then," he said to the people staring at him, "where were we?" Jumping over and kneeling next to the hand, he looked at the glowing gold energy that surrounded it. He blew some of it away, grinning. "There now, d'you see? Used the regeneration energy to heal myself, but as soon as that was done, I didn't need to change, I didn't _want_ to, why would I? Look at me! So, to stop the energy going all the way, I siphoned off the rest into a handy bio-matching receptacle, namely, my hand, that hand there, my handy spare hand! Remember, Christmas Day, Sycorax, lost my hand in a swordfight? That's my hand!" He turned to Rose. "What d'you think?" 

Rose smiled tremulously. "You're still you?" 

He approached her, his beautiful wife. "I'm still me." 

Rose threw herself into his arms and he clutched her to his chest, his eyes closing. They held each other for a long moment, and then Rose pulled back, tears still in her eyes. "You'll be needing this back," she said, holding up his ring. With a smile, he held out his hand and let her slip it back on his finger, his hearts lurching with love for her. He knew they had an audience, but he didn't care; he leaned down and kissed her gently on the lips. _It's going to be okay,_ he thought. _We're going to be okay._

With a start, Rose swung around, clearly having forgotten until that moment about Jackie and Mickey. Perhaps one of them had spoken, now or earlier, but he had neither seen nor heard anything but Rose. "Mum!" she said, and flung herself at her mother. She and Jackie met in a tearful hug, with Mickey standing close, not wanting to interrupt the mother-daughter reunion but obviously wanting to greet Rose too. 

"Mickety-Mick-Mick!" the Doctor shouted, grinning at the man. Compared to the scared boy he had known so many years ago, Mickey was hardly recognizable. He set down an overly large gun on the floor of the TARDIS next to one that presumably Jackie had been wielding, and came over to shake the Doctor's hand. 

"Glad to see you're still taking care of Rose," he said. 

"Always," he responded. 

"Oh, my baby girl," Jackie was saying, rocking back and forth with Rose in her arms. "I never thought I'd get to see you again." 

"Me either, mum," Rose said, pulling back and wiping her nose on her sleeve. 

"How old are you now, sweetheart?" Jackie asked. 

"Thirty-four," Rose said, "approximately." 

"Impossible," she said, "you don't look that old, and there's no way I'm old enough to have a thirty-four-year-old daughter." Jackie took Rose's hand and examined her wedding ring. "And you got married? You and the Doctor?" 

Rose giggled tearfully. "Yeah. 'Bout eight years ago, he finally made an honest woman of me," she said, turning to wink at him. 

Jackie was staring at him like ... well, like he was an alien. "You married my daughter?" she asked. 

The Doctor began to brace himself for the inevitable slap. Good to know that some things never changed. "Um... yes?" 

And then Jackie was in his arms, hugging him the way she had been hugging Rose. "Oh, you darling boy! You've been my son-in-law all this time and I didn't even know it!" She grabbed his face in her hands and planted a wet kiss on his lips, then one on each of his cheeks. Right, now he remembered what being around Jackie was like. He extracted himself from her embrace, trying to wipe her saliva off of his face. 

Rose and Mickey greeted each other, Mickey lifting Rose off the ground in a big hug. "Glad to see you've survived all these years of danger, living in the TARDIS," he said. 

"I could say the same for you; you still at Torchwood?" 

"How do you think we got here?" He pulled a round, yellow device out of his pocket and showed it to her. It was sleeker than the ones the Doctor remembered, but still the sight of it made him a little ill. "Weird things started happening in our universe. First, the stars were disappearing from the sky, then, the rift in Torchwood Tower started opening at random intervals. So we rebuilt these, based loosely on the original design, and here we are." 

"And you, mum?" Rose asked. 

"Well, I wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to see my daughter, was I?" 

"But ... mum, this is dangerous, and Lily ..." Rose protested. 

"Pete's looking after her. Rose, if this is as big as Mickey said, then maybe I can help. Help save the worlds for both my daughters. And for my son-in-law," she said, winking at the Doctor. 

"Anyway," the Doctor said, desperate to divert Jackie before he ended up the victim of more of her affection. He looked around at the people assembled: Rose, Jack, Donna, Mickey, Jackie. Well, he could certainly think of worse teams to save the world with. "We need to form a plan -" 

"Doctor," Donna said, "I have to go try to find Phil. He might still be alive, he might be at home, I have to check." 

"Donna, it's not safe -" 

"Don't argue with me, Doctor. I'm going, I don't care what you say." 

"What if it were me?" Rose asked quietly. "You'd go, you know you would." 

This was a path of thought he didn't want to go down; the things he would do to save Rose gave him nightmares. Before he could answer, all the lights on the TARDIS died. 

He ran for the console. "They've got us! Power's gone! Some kind of chronon loop -" The TARDIS lurched, making everyone stumble and grab onto something. 

"There's a massive Dalek ship, at the centre of the planets, they're calling it the Crucible. I'm guessing that's our destination," Jack said.

"You said all these planets were like an engine. But what for?" Donna asked. 

He turned to Mickey. "What did you say about the stars? Your universe is ahead of ours, you could see the future." 

"It was the darkness. The stars were going out, one by one. We looked up at the sky, and they were dying. Something is destroying _everything._ " 

The scanner beeped and the Doctor looked at it. "The Dalek Crucible. All aboard." There was a bump, then silence. "We'll have to go out. If we don't, they'll get in." 

"Wait, you told me nothing can get through those doors," Jack said. "You've got extrapolator shielding." 

"Last time we fought the Daleks, they were scavengers, and hybrids, and mad, but this is a fully-fledged Dalek Empire, at the height of its power, experts at fighting TARDISes, they can do anything. Right now, that wooden door... is just wood." 

"What about your Dimension Jump?" Jack asked Mickey. 

"Needs twenty minutes to recharge." 

"What about your vortex manipulator?" the Doctor asked Jack. 

"Went down with the power loss." 

"Right then. All of us, together. Rose?" He turned to look at her, and saw her staring into space. "Rose?" 

After a moment, she shook herself. "Yeah." 

He walked over and put his hands on her arms. "I'm sorry. There's nothing else we can do." He tried not to think about the fact that after everything he had done, they were both probably going to die anyway. 

"Yeah, I was just... I know." She offered him a small smile. 

"It's been good, hasn't it? All of it, everything we did. You were _brilliant_." 

"Yeah." She brushed her lips across his. "You too." 

"So!" he said with false cheer. "Shall we?" 

"Daleks," Mickey said, almost laughing. 

"Ohh God," Jack said with a grin.

"Right. Blimey." The Doctor walked down the ramp, the others following him. With a deep breath, he opened the door and left the TARDIS. And looked up at more Daleks than he had seen since the Time War. Fully-fledged Dalek empire, indeed. "Ohhhkay..." Jack stepped up beside him, and he felt just a tiny bit better for his presence. 

"Behold, Doctor!" screamed a red Dalek. He'd seen one of those before, what did they call them, Supreme Daleks? "Behold the might of the true Dalek Race!" 

He turned around, noticing for the first time that Rose hadn't followed everyone else out of the TARDIS. "Rose!" he called, "you're no safer in there." Suddenly, the door to the TARDIS slammed shut. "Rose! Rose!!" 

He heard her calling from the inside. "Doctor, what have you done? You're not sending me away!" 

"It wasn't me, I didn't do anything!" He turned back to the Supreme Dalek, and he could feel a vein throbbing in his forehead. "What did you do?" 

"This is not of Dalek origin." 

Rose was still banging on the door. "Doctor! What's going on?" 

"This is Time Lord treachery," the Supreme Dalek continued. 

"It wasn't me! The door closed on its own!" 

"The TARDIS is a weapon and it will be destroyed." A panel in the floor slid open and the TARDIS dropped through it like a stone. 

"What are you doing? Bring it back!" He ran over to the platform where the Supreme Dalek was standing, beyond realizing the futility of trying to reason with a Dalek. "What've you done, where's it going?" 

"The Crucible has a heart of Z-Neutrino Energy. The TARDIS will be deposited into the core." 

"The defences are down, she'll be torn apart!" He was screaming; at whom, he wasn't really sure.

"Rose is still in there!" Jackie yelled, running over to stand next to the him. 

"The female and the TARDIS will perish together. Observe!" 

The Doctor felt a stab of cold terror in his chest. "Please. _Please_. I am begging you, I'll do anything. Put me in her place, you can do anything to me, I don't care, just get Rose out of there!" His voice got louder and more ragged with every word. He knew that pleading with a Dalek was ludicrous. But what else could he do? He was completely at their mercy - they had everything that he cared about. Everything. 

"You are connected to the TARDIS. Now feel it die!" 

A holographic view screen was brought up in front of them. The TARDIS was there, floating in a sea of burning plasma. It wouldn't take more than a minute for the TARDIS' meager defenses to be breached, and then she would burn. And Rose along with her. He imagined her terror, alone in the ship that had been their home together for more than a decade. His _wife_ \- why hadn't he told her he loved her before he'd turned to walk out of the TARDIS? He was distantly aware of it when Donna took his hand. He was vaguely cognizant of Jackie sobbing at his side, Jackie who had just found her daughter in time to see her slaughtered by the Daleks. His fault. All his fault. He would deserve every second of the hellish existence he would experience after he lost them - Rose and his ship. 

When the TARDIS disappeared into the miasma, he thought he should feel more pain than he did. He just felt numb. He supposed it would be easier, in the long run, if he failed to stop the Daleks. At least he had nothing to live for. 

"The TARDIS has been destroyed, and your female with it," grated the Supreme Dalek. "Now tell me, Doctor. What do you feel? Anger? Sorrow? Despair?" 

"Yes," he whispered. 

"Then if emotions are so important, surely we have enhanced you?" 

"Yeah, well feel this!" He looked over to see Jack shooting the Supreme Dalek with his revolver. 

"Exterminate!" Jack's body glowed green, his skeleton visible like a perverse sort of X-ray, before he slumped to the ground, dead. 

"Jesus, Jack!" Mickey fell to the ground at Jack's side, unaware of the impermanence of this death. "They killed him." 

"I know. I'm sorry." The Doctor dropped down at Mickey's side. "You and Jackie," he whispered. "Use your teleports and get out of here." 

"But -" 

"Don't argue with me. Someone should survive. _Please_." 

Mickey nodded, once. Standing up slowly, Mickey moved to hug Jackie, who was still weeping. He saw Mickey's hand slip into Jackie's pocket, and then in a flash both of them were gone. 

"More treachery!" screamed the Supreme Dalek. "Find the two humans and put them with the others. Escort these two to the Vault," he said, meaning the Doctor and Donna. "They are the playthings of Davros now." 

 

*** 

 

 _Thumpthump ... Thumpthump._ There it had been again, filling her mind. _Thumpthump ... Thumpthump._ Rose hadn't realized what was happening until the TARDIS door had slammed, locking her in. At first she had thought the Doctor had activated an emergency program somehow, sending her away to safety while he met his death. But he had sounded as baffled as she was, shouting through the door. Then the world had dropped out from under her and she had only been able to cling to the floor grating. 

It was hot, so hot, and everything was burning. She crawled along the floor as roundels on the walls exploded around her. Was this the way they would both die, herself and the TARDIS? What would the Doctor do without them? Maybe ... she knew how to activate the TARDIS' emergency dematerialization program. If only she could get over to the console. She kept crawling, the heat of the fire flushing her face.

When she reached the console, she found herself staring at the ever-present spare hand. The container was bubbling like mad. Thumpthump ... Thumpthump. Suddenly the noise and terror and destruction fell away and all she could hear was that beating heart. She reached out toward the hand, like she was barely in control of her own movements, and her vision filled with gold.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Large sections of dialogue and plot in this chapter are adapted from the episode "Journey's End", by Russell T. Davies.

Rose could barely see; the smoke was getting thicker. The first thing she could make out on the floor was the broken container that had held the Doctor's spare hand, empty of its contents. _He's going to be so mad when he sees that,_ she thought, and then realized immediately how daft that was - the TARDIS was falling to pieces around her, and he'd never know about his stupid hand. Which was ... where was it? She looked and saw it there on the floor, glowing gold, moving ... _moving?!_ And ... was it growing? Rose was suddenly wracked with a cough, and when she was able to focus again, it took her brain a moment to register what she was looking at.

"It ... it's you!"

The Doctor sat on the floor in front of her. "Oh, yes."

She looked pointedly at his groin, and even in the midst of her dire situation, couldn't help but smile. "You're naked."

"Wellll ... that's not necessarily a bad thing, is it?" he asked with a rakish wink. He looked around, took in the destruction, and scrambled for the console, where he initiated the emergency dematerialization. Immediately the room seemed to cool down considerably, although the damage was extensive.

"What ... what's happening?" she asked as she struggled to her feet.

"I promise, I'll explain everything," the Doctor assured her. "Just let me go ..." he gestured toward the rest of the ship with his thumb, "get my kit on."

"All right." He darted from the room.

Rose just stood there. The fires had gone out, and now the TARDIS seemed to be healing itself. Rose had seen it do this a few times, and it was always a bizarre thing to watch. She looked down at her feet. The broken jar was still there, all of the liquid presumably spilled below the floor grating, but the hand was gone. The hand was gone because ... she looked toward the hallway, bewildered. _It couldn't be._ Surely the Doctor had managed to find some kind of teleport from the Dalek Crucible to the TARDIS, but it was like _Terminator_ or something, and the teleport didn't work on clothing. That had to be it, because the alternative ...

The Doctor jogged back into the room, now in his blue suit - well, blue trousers and a vest, and carrying the blue jacket. He leapt onto the metal stairs against one of the walls and began inspecting the roundels. He polished one with his suit jacket. "All repaired. Lovely." He jumped down again, throwing on his jacket and approaching her. "Sssh! No one knows we're here. Gotta keep quiet. Silent running, like on submarines, when they can't even drop a spanner. Don't drop a spanner."

"How ..." She didn't know what to ask first. "Where's your hand?" She pointed at the jar on the floor.

He waved his right hand at her, fingers wiggling. "Right here. All that regeneration energy went into the hand. Look at my hand! Love that hand! But then you touched it, _wham!_ " He gestured suddenly at her, making her jump. "Instantaneous biological metacrisis."

_"What?"_

"I grew, out of you."

Rose was still staring at his hand. "You mean, that's the hand that's been floating in that jar for the last fifteen years?" He grinned and nodded. "But that's disgusting!"

"Oi!" He flexed his fingers. "Mind you, it is a bit tingly. Expect that'll wear off though."

"So that means ... you're not the Doctor?" 

He looked affronted. "Of course I am! Exactly the same, same man, same everything ... wait." He felt his chest and grimaced. "One heart. I've got one heart. This body's got only one heart!"

"You mean you're _human_?"

"Ohhh, that's disgusting!"

"Oi!"

"Sorry." He frowned, still holding his hand to his chest. "But I am... No, wait, I'm still the Doctor, but I'm ... part Time Lord, part Human. Blimey."

"It's like... I kept hearing that noise, that heartbeat..."

"That was me. My single heart." He walked back over to the console. "Cause I'm unique, there's never been another like me, not ever. I'm a complicated event in time and space, it must have rippled back. Converging on you, because of that fragment of the Bad Wolf inside your brain."

She shook her head, trying to understand. "But the Doctor, I mean, the other Doctor ... he's still ... there are _two_ of you?"

"Yup." 

"And, what do you remember? I mean, is the swordfight with the Sycorax the last thing?" She tried to imagine catching this strange man up on the last fifteen years.

" _What?_ " he said, his voice rising in pitch. "Of course not, I don't keep my brain in my hand. My memories come from the regeneration energy. I remember everything up to the point when I was dying." He smiled a sweet smile at her. "I remember you telling me you loved me while Jack pulled you away."

Rose felt a little bit like she might be sick. She had told the Doctor, her _husband_ , that she loved him, not this strange hybrid. Except, she _had_. It was more than she could get her head around.

"What we need to figure out now," he said, rubbing the back of his neck, "is what to do next. Tell me everything that I missed."

 

***

 

Donna and the Doctor, with their Dalek escorts behind them, stepped out of a lift shaft into a dark, cavernous space. The Daleks forced them to cross the floor, finally stopping with Donna several feet away from the Doctor.

"Activate the holding cells," came a voice out of the darkness.

Donna was momentarily blinded. When she opened her eyes, squinting, she could barely see anything outside the shaft of light that surrounded her. Finally she was able to discern that the Doctor was in his own spotlight. He reached out with one hand, touching the wall of some kind of force field. Donna did the same, confirming that she was also trapped.

"Excellent," said the voice. "Even when powerless, a Time Lord is best contained. It is time we talked, Doctor, after so very long." Gliding out of the shadows toward them was the frightening visage from the transmission earlier. He appeared to be half-Dalek, half ... well, she would say half-man, but that was being perhaps too generous. His withered face and ruined eyes were horrifying enough, without the thought of what was under his black leather tunic.

The Doctor said nothing at first. Donna turned to look at him standing there under the light, macabre shadows cast across his face. He was so very, very still, and Donna wondered what was keeping him on his feet. Her own grief for Rose and for the TARDIS and her fears that Phil was dead too left her struggling to hold it together; she couldn't even imagine what the Doctor was feeling. For some reason, a conversation with Jack from many years ago flashed in her mind. _He saves the world again and again, and the world just keeps taking and taking until he’s got nothing left._

Then the Doctor appeared to go through a transformation, drawing himself up and suddenly beginning to talk, fast and loud. "We're not doing the nostalgia tour, I want to know what's happening, right here, right now. The Supreme Dalek said Vault, yeah? We're in the Vault? As in, dungeon? Cellar? Prison? You're not in charge of the Daleks, are you? They've got you locked away down here in the basement like, what, a servant? A slave? Court jester? No no no no no, I've got the word. You're the Dalek's _pet_!" It was a performance, and Donna thought she truly understood for the first time where the constant chatter, constant motion sprung from: it was the only way he could cover his overwhelming rage and sadness.

Davros glided toward Donna, and she tried not to shrink from the sight of his horrifying face. "So very full of fire, is he not?"

"Leave her alone," the Doctor said.

"She is mine, to do with as I please."

"Then why am I still alive?" Donna asked.

"You must be here, it was foretold. Even the Supreme Dalek would not dare to contradict the prophecies of Dalek Caan." He flicked a switch on his control panel and across the room, the ruined Dalek appeared, writhing.

"So cold and dark and hot, fire is coming, the endless flames... " it trilled, sounding absurdly pleased.

Donna recoiled. "What's wrong with it?"

"It flew into the Time War, unprotected," the Doctor muttered.

"Caan did more than that," Davros said as if he were a proud parent. "He _saw_ Time. Its infinite complexity and majesty, raging through his mind. And he saw you. Both of you."

"This I have foreseen, in the wild and the wind: the Doctor will be here, as witness, at the end of everything. The Doctor and his precious Children of Time," Caan said, giggling. "And one of them will die."

"Was it you, Caan? Did you kill Rose?" The Doctor was near to snarling. "Why did the TARDIS door close? _Tell me!_ "

"That's it!" Davros crowed. "The anger, the fire! The rage of a Time Lord who butchered millions, there he is!" Donna watched the Doctor's shoulders heave; he was trembling with fury, but he said nothing else. "Why so shy? Show your companion. Show her your true self. Dalek Caan has promised me that, too. For now, the ending approaches; the testing begins!"

"Testing of what?" Donna asked. 

"The Reality Bomb!" shouted Davros like a mad creature. "Behold the apotheosis of my genius!"

Images on a view screen flashed before them, but Donna could make little sense of them. There were people, grouped under a large transmitter. Then there was some kind of energy discharge, and the people seemed to just ... evaporate. 

"But that's Z-neutrino energy..." the Doctor muttered. "Flattened by the alignment of the planets into a single string... _No._ "

"Doctor?" Donna said cautiously. "What happened?" The Doctor just stared straight ahead, his face a mask of defeat.

"Electrical energy," Davros answered her. "Every atom in existence is bound by an electrical field. The Reality Bomb cancels it out. Structure falls apart. And that test was focused on the prisoners only; the full transmission will dissolve every form of matter."

"The twenty-seven planets," the Doctor said, his voice quiet. "They become one vast transmitter. Blasting that wavelength ..."

"Across the entire universe. Never stopping, never faltering, never fading. People and planets and stars will become dust, and the dust will become atoms, and the atoms will become nothing!" Davros was screaming now. "And the wavelength will continue! Breaking through the Rift at the heart of the Medusa Cascade! Into every dimension! Every parallel! Every single corner of creation! This is my ultimate victory, Doctor! _The destruction of reality itself!_ "

 

***

 

Martha wasn't sure how long she stared at the blank computer screen. Tom was putting the kids to bed; she could hear him reading them a story. They would be gathered together on Sophie's bed, and after the book was finished Tom would tuck Sophie in and kiss her goodnight and then he would take their son to his room and repeat the process. Martha longed to join them, but she knew if she did, she wouldn't be able to hold it together. Not knowing what she might have to do. With a deep breath, she entered the codes Jack had given her into the panel on the Indigo harness.

"What do we do now?" Tom asked from the doorway.

Martha didn't look at him. "The kids are in bed?"

"Of course."

"We've lost contact with the Subwave, and the TARDIS. So it's up to me." She tightened the harness on her shoulders and stood up. "You stay indoors, there's no Daleks on this block. You should be all right, just keep quiet."

"But where are _you_ going?"

"I'm a member of UNIT, and they gave me the Osterhagen Key. I've got to do my job." Her voice broke on the last word; wasn't her job to protect her family? She turned to look at him. "I'm sorry."

"Martha, whatever that thing is, your children need you here. Can't you just ... Martha, please don't go."

It was months into their relationship before she shared with him the circumstances of their meeting in the year that never was. He had taken it all in stride, as he had everything else: UNIT, Torchwood, aliens, the Doctor ... But sometimes she caught him looking at her like he wasn't sure who she was, or what she was capable of. Tom held out his arms to her now, and she'd never wanted anything more than to run into them. But she knew if she did, she'd never be able let go.

"I love you," she whispered. "I love you all so very much." With a sob, Martha pulled the ripcords.

She materialized right where she intended, outside of Nuremberg, Germany. Fifteen minutes later, she found herself sitting in the Osterhagen station, deep underground. In front of her were four monitors, all blank. With a trembling hand, she pressed the comm button. 

"This is Osterhagen Station One. Can anyone hear me?" Her voice came out raspy, so Martha cleared her throat and tried again. "Repeat, this is Osterhagen Station One. My name is Martha Jones. Is there anyone there?"

One of the screens, under which the placard read 'Liberia', flickered to life, revealing a grim man. "This is Station Four."

"Reading you, Station Four. Anyone else? This is Osterhagen Station One, do you copy?"

Another screen awoke, this one marked 'China'. The scared eyes of a young Asian woman looked out at her. "This is Osterhagen Station Five. Are you receiving, Station One?"

"I've got you. That makes three of us. And three is all we need."

"My name is Anna Zhou, what's yours?"

"Martha Jones. What about you, Station Four?"

"You don't need to know," he said darkly. 

"So what happens now?" asked Anna. "Do we do it? UNIT instructions say, once three Osterhagen Stations are online ..."

Martha thought about what they were poised to do. In some ways, this act, using this key, was much more difficult than all those months spent crossing the globe, telling the Doctor's story. At least then, her purpose had been clear, and save for a few terrifying moments, she had never wavered from it. She had felt pure and noble and _right_. This was none of those things. She thought about Sophie and Michael and Tom. She thought about her parents, and Tish and Leo. Was this better than a life under the Daleks, or worse? And who was she to decide? Was this what the Doctor had felt like, before his final act in the Time War?

Martha looked into the camera. "No. Not yet. I've got a higher authority, way above UNIT. And there's one more thing the Doctor would do."


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Large sections of dialogue and plot in this chapter are adapted from the episode "Journey's End", by Russell T. Davies.
> 
> In case anyone cares, I've been calling the duplicate Doctor in this story Ten III to distinguish him from the canonical duplicate Doctor (Ten II).

The Doctor stood in his containment cell, feeling every year of his long, long life. As it turned out, no one was going to be around to mourn Rose anyway - including him, and he couldn't deny that was a relief. When the view screen flickered at the periphery of his vision, he didn't look at it. Not until he heard a familiar voice.

"This is Martha Jones, representing the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, on behalf of the human race. Can you hear me? This message is for the Dalek Crucible, repeat, can you hear me?"

"It begins, as Dalek Caan foretold," Davros said.

The mad Dalek began speaking again. "The Children of Time will gather, and one of them will die."

"Stop saying that!" the Doctor shouted. "Put me through! Martha! Where are you?" 

"Doctor, I'm sorry, I had to..." she said, her eyes pleading. The Doctor saw Martha's eyes cut to the side and widen when she saw Donna, but she said nothing. Martha was smart enough to know not to give anything away to the Daleks. 

Davros glided forward. "Ohh, but the Doctor is powerless: my prisoner. State your intent."

"I've got the Osterhagen Key. Leave this planet and its people alone, or I'll use it."

"Osterhagen what? What's an Osterhagen Key?" the Doctor asked.

"There's a chain of 25 nuclear warheads, placed at strategic points beneath the Earth's crust," Martha said. "If I use this key, they detonate, and the Earth gets ripped apart."

 _"What?!"_ The concept was so ridiculously idiotic that he forgot for a moment to be miserable. "Who invented that?! Well, someone called Osterhagen, I suppose - Martha, are you _insane_?"

"The Osterhagen Key is to be used... if the suffering of the Human Race is so great, so without hope, that this becomes the final option."

"That's _never_ an option!" he shouted.

"Don't argue with me, Doctor! Cause it's more than that, now - I reckon the Daleks need these 27 planets for something, so what if it becomes 26? What happens then? Daleks? Would you risk it?"

Before anyone could respond, the view screen divided, and on the other half from Martha resolved the image of Jack with Mickey and Jackie at his side. "Captain Jack Harkness, calling all the Dalek boys and girls, are you receiving me? Don't send in your goons, or I'll set this thing off!"

 _What now?_ "Captain, what are you doing?" the Doctor asked, dreading the answer.

"Mickey Mouse came to this universe prepared - we've wired a very powerful antimatter explosive into the power core of this place. I pull this pin, the entire Crucible goes up."

"But ... Jack! You can't!" The Doctor couldn't believe this was happening.

"I'll do it," Jack continued. "Don't imagine I wouldn't. I'm ready."

Martha chimed back in. "It's the Crucible or the Earth."

Davros turned to look at the Doctor. "And the prophecy unfolds. The Doctor's soul is revealed. The man who claims to abhor violence, never carrying a gun, but this is the truth, Doctor. You take ordinary people and fashion them into weapons. You stand behind the soldiers of war and make decisions that result in the deaths of thousands, and for what? For the love of a pathetic little human female. And now behold the rest of your Children of Time, transformed into murderers. I made the Daleks, Doctor. You made this." 

He closed his eyes. "They're trying to help."

"Already, I have seen them sacrificed today, for their beloved Doctor. The Earth woman who fell, opening the Subwave Network -"

The Doctor looked at him. "Who was that?"

Jack answered him. "Harriet Jones. She gave her life, to get you here." Harriet Jones. He had deposed her, on a whim, and she had sacrificed her life to bring him through to the Earth.

"And how many more? Just think!" Davros shouted. "How many have died in your name?"

The Doctor shuddered, his fists clenching at his sides. Davros was right - there were so many ... he was a monster.

"The Doctor," Davros crowed. "The man who keeps running, never looking back. Because he dares not, out of shame. This is my final victory, Doctor. I have shown you... yourself."

"Bollocks."

The Doctor looked up, surprised. Donna was staring down Davros with her arms across her chest. "That's complete and utter bollocks," she continued. "The Doctor has made more sacrifices for the good of the universe than probably anybody in the history of the world! He doesn't turn people into weapons, he _inspires_ people to struggle against Evil. And yes, sometimes that requires violence, but more often, it stops violence! How many people, how many _civilizations_ , are alive in this universe because of the Doctor? More than he even knows, I'd wager. So you can shut your gob, Skeletor, get the hell out of my face!"

Davros just stared at her, for once at a loss for words.

One of the Daleks off to the side suddenly spoke: "It is ready! Transmat engaged!" On the screens, Martha, Jack, Mickey, and Jackie disappeared, and after a second reappeared in the vault with them, falling to the floor, stunned by the teleport. 

Jack recovered first and ran to Martha's side, helping her. "I've got you, it's all right."

The Doctor felt panic seize him. On top of everything, was he going to have to watch all of his friends killed in front of him? "Don't move, please, just stay still!"

"Guard them! On your knees, all of you!" Davros shouted.

The Doctor could tell that Mickey and Jack were not going to cooperate. "Do as he says!" he shouted. They each looked at him, and then slowly sank to their knees.

"And the final prophecy is in place," Davros said. "The Doctor and his Children, all gathered, as witnesses! Supreme Dalek! The time has come! Now detonate the Reality Bomb!"

 

*** 

 

The new Doctor jumped up from below the floor grating for the third time, a few more bits of wiring clenched in his teeth. He picked up the device he had been assembling and added the wires to it. Rose had retreated to the far side of the console room, watching him. He looked ... exactly the same. His mannerisms, his constant muttering as he worked, even his hair was the same, if a little under-styled. How could he not be the Doctor? And yet, how could he be, if he was part human? 

"Are you and I ...?" Rose hesitated.

The new Doctor looked up at her soberly. "Married?"

She swallowed uncomfortably. "No, related. You know, since you grew out of me, aren't we ... related, like, biologically?"

He shook his head. "The short answer is no, but it's complicated. We can't really be related genetically, or I wouldn't look identical to the other ... me. Yet, obviously your human genome was part of the template to create this part-human version of me. I'll have to research it further, but if you're asking if you're my sister, or ..." he made a face, "mother, the answer is no. That would mean I'm not the Doctor, and clearly I am," he added, sounding just a little annoyed.

"Okay." It suddenly struck her how selfish she was being - people were dying and she was having an internal crisis about what made the Doctor the Doctor. _Time to get in the game,_ she thought. "What are you building?" Rose finally asked, approaching him.

"It's our only hope, a Z-Neutrino biological inversion catalyser."

Rose blinked. "A what?"

"Davros said he built those Daleks out of _himself_. His genetic code runs through the entire race. If I can use this, to lock the Crucible's transmission on to Davros himself..."

"It destroys the Daleks!"

"Biggest backfire in history!" the Doctor shouted, connecting a final wire. "It's ready!" Holding onto the catalyser, he used a foot to slam a lever on the console into place. "Maximum power!" The lights came up all around them and the rotor pulsed to life. "Ready for this, Rose?"

"Let's do it!" she shouted, catching his enthusiasm.

 

*** 

 

Time was running out. "You can't, Davros, just listen to me, just _stop_!" the Doctor shouted. A few minutes left before the end of the universe, and all he could do was stand there and watch it happen, too bogged down by his own grief to think of a solution. When the sound started, he actually didn't recognize it - he almost never heard it from the outside. It wasn't until the faint outline of the police box appeared that he was able to wrap his brain around what was happening. It was the TARDIS. 

Suddenly he was transported back to another time, surrounded by Daleks, watching the TARDIS materialize, and he became convinced that Rose must've done it again. The door would open, and she would be standing there, gold and terrible, and she would destroy the Daleks. He would have to sacrifice this incarnation after all, to save her. 

He couldn't have been happier.

Then the door did open, and someone stood there, framed in the doorway. It was ... _him_.

_"What?!?"_

The duplicate of him (wearing _his_ blue suit!) ran out of the TARDIS, a weapon in his hand. The Doctor could only stand there, boggling, as Davros raised his artificial hand and conducted an arc of electricity which hit the doppelganger and flung him backwards several feet, where he landed behind a Dalek work-station. The weapon, a cobbled-together Z-Neutrino biological inversion catalyser, he could now see, was knocked from his hand and fell to the floor. 

Then Rose was running out of the TARDIS. If anyone else expressed joy that she was alive, the Doctor wasn't aware of it; his ears seemed to be ringing, and he couldn't take his eyes off of her. _Rose._

Davros began to raise his hand again.

"Rose, _no!!_ " the Doctor shouted.

Across the room, Jack Harkness pulled another pistol out of his boot and before his Dalek guard could react, fired at Davros. The bullet ricocheted off of Davros' hand, making his shot go wide and miss Rose. It did cause her to pull up sharply, before she could reach the catalyser. Davros recovered, and quickly pointed at the weapon and fired, reducing it to a char mark on the floor.

"Damn," said Rose as a Dalek glided over to her, keeping her rooted in one spot. She looked over to where the - what, clone? - had fallen, but from her angle didn't seem to be able to discern anything. Rose met the Doctor's eyes. Smiling a sad smile, she gave him a little wave.

Davros was back to his ranting. "Stand witness, Time Lord! Stand witness, Humans! Your strategies have failed, your weapons are useless, and the end of the universe is come!" The countdown continued; it was a matter of seconds away. He held Rose's gaze; at least they were together at the end of everything. It was a small comfort, but it was something.

"Aaaand, closing all Z-Neutrino relay loops with an internalised synchronous back-feed reversal loop - oh yes!" The Doctor looked over and there he was - the duplicate, standing at the Dalek work-station with a huge grin on his face. He could hear a steadily dropping pitch, like a giant engine grinding to a halt.

One of the Daleks screeched, "System in shutdown! Detonation negative!"

"But ..." Donna sputtered, "how come there are two of you?"

"Human biological metacrisis," called the other Doctor. And he was that, the Doctor now recognized. Not an imposter, but in some sense really another Doctor. _I did this,_ he realized, thinking of the hand, and his aborted regeneration. Something had happened with Rose, and this man had been created. But what had it done to _her_? 

"You will suffer for this," Davros said, lifting his metallic hand. Electricity arced around his own hand, but didn't go anywhere, and Davros screamed in pain.

"Ha! Bio-electric dampening field with a retrogressive arc inversion." The Daleks began threatening extermination, but it immediately became clear that their weapons were inoperable. "Macrotransmission of a K-filter wavelength blocking Dalek weaponry in a self-replicating energy blindfold matrix? _Molto bene!_ "

"But, how did you work that out? You, you, you're..." the Doctor stammered.

"I'm you! Wellll ..." He grinned. "Holding cells deactivated!" The force fields shut off, and he and Donna were free. "Well, don't just stand there, Doctor," shouted the other Doctor. "Come give me a hand here!" He could do no other than obey; in more than 900 years, he couldn't remember ever being in a situation madder than this.

Davros was screaming at the Daleks, but his double hit a few more buttons and twirled a dial, making the Daleks spin uselessly in place. They were helpless, and the Doctor thought that he might at any moment start laughing hysterically. "What did you do?" he asked.

"Used the biofeedback shielding to exacerbate the Dalekenium interface, thus inculcating a trip-stitch circuit-breaker in the psychokinetic threshold manipulator!" his double said happily.

"But that's brilliant! Why didn't I think of that?"

"Cause you're just a Time Lord, lacking that little bit of human gut instinct. Now let's send that trip-stitch all over the ship!" Both of them went to work.

The Doctor looked up at him. "We've got twenty-seven planets we need to send home."

"So we'd better get started, hadn't we? Activate magnatron!"

As they worked, the Doctor was vaguely aware of Jack and Mickey threatening Davros, their guns in hand. He looked over at the others, and they seemed to be gaggled together. Rose and her mother were hugging, and again the Doctor felt light-headed with relief that she was alive. She was alive and the universe was saved. "Ha!" he shouted, unable to keep it in. "Off you go, Clom!"

The other Doctor was also manic with enthusiasm. "Back home, Adopise III! Shallacatop, Pyrovillia and the Lost Moon of Poosh, sorted!"

Donna stomped over to them. "Is anyone gonna tell us what the hell is going on?" she said, looking back and forth between the two identical men with her arms crossed across her chest.

The Doctor looked up and saw Jackie standing at Donna's side, affecting an identical pose. "Please tell me I've been knocked on the head and I'm seeing double."

"No, Jackie, there are two of us," the new Doctor said without looking up.

"I guess that should be obvious," Jackie said, "with one of you wearing such a godawful suit." Donna burst into gales of laughter.

"Oi!" both Doctors shouted simultaneously, stretching the exclamation into multiple syllables in exactly the same way, which only made Donna laugh harder. Martha and the rest, having shoved aside the nonfunctioning Daleks like overgrown toys, joined them at the work-station. 

"I always told him that blue didn't suit his coloring as well as the brown," Donna said to Jackie, "but does he ever listen?"

Jackie smiled at her. "I'm Jackie Tyler."

Donna shook her Jackie's hand. "Donna Noble. I've known Rose for a long time, and it is such a pleasure to meet you after hearing so many stories."

Jackie and Donna together was a terrifying prospect, and the Doctor saw the same trepidation on his duplicate's face that he knew was on his own. "Anyway -"

"Anyway, you need to explain what exactly happened," Donna interrupted.

The other Doctor answered her. " _He_ poured all his regeneration energy into his spare hand, yeah? Rose touched the hand, and _I_ grew out of that. Part Human, part Time Lord, all Doctor!" 

"So there's two of you? Two doctors?" This from Mickey.

"Oh, I can't tell you what I'm thinking right now," Jack commented, winking at Rose.

Their attention was arrested by Davros, who again was screaming. But for once, not at them. "But you promised me, Dalek Caan! Why did you not foresee this?" Caan only laughed, a high-pitched squeal.

And then the truth of everything struck the Doctor like a blow to the chest. "Ohh, I think he did. Something's been manipulating the timelines for ages. It never quite made sense to me that there could be a tiny crack between this universe and Pete's World all that time, and I not be able to sense it. It seemed more than even the Bad Wolf could have done, allowing that crack to stay open, manipulating dreams, leading Rose back across the Void. I think the Bad Wolf had help bringing you back to me, Rose."

"You betrayed the Daleks!" Davros said.

"I _saw_ the Daleks," Caan trilled. "What we have done, throughout time and space. I saw the truth of us, Creator, and I decreed: no more."

"Heads up!" Jack shouted.

The Supreme Dalek was descending into the vault. "Davros, you have betrayed us. The Vault will be purged, and you will all be exterminated!" His weapon, apparently the only Dalek laser that was still functional ( _must operate on a different frequency,_ thought the Doctor), moved and fired. The work-station where the Doctor was standing exploded in a shower of sparks, and he leapt away, shielding his face. 

"Like I was saying," he heard Jack shout, "feel this!" He looked up just in time to see the Supreme Dalek explode. 

Turning back to the flaming work-station, he checked the readings. "We've lost the Magnatron! And there's only one planet left, ohh, guess which one?" The Earth was still there in the Medusa Cascade, but he didn't despair for long. "But we can use the TARDIS!" He dashed through the familiar blue doors, taking a moment to praise whatever higher powers might or might not exist in the universe that his beloved ship was here, and fine, and whole. It would be tricky, what he was planning, but with the use of some of the resources on Earth, it just might be possible. He made some adjustments to the TARDIS' navigation controls and checked the readouts. Yes, definitely possible, especially with so many people to help him. They would be all right: the Earth would be saved. He ran back for the doors.

As the Doctor emerged into the vault again, it was to the sight of Daleks exploding. The whole Crucible seemed to be on fire. He looked at his duplicate, a cold kind of dread seeping into him. He had seen this before; it was the end of the Time War all over again. "What have you done?"


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the dialogue and plot in this chapter are adapted from the episode "Journey's End", by Russell T. Davies.
> 
> So now I've introduced my duplicate Doctor (I call him Ten III), and this is the last chapter that will contain excerpts from "Journey's End". At this point, it might be worthwhile for readers to remember my earlier warnings that this story will contain some very adult themes (perhaps not shocking, as I am considered one of the grande dames of Ten-on-Ten) and sadness. Don't say I didn't warn you.

"Holding Earth stability, maintaining atmospheric shell ..." The Doctor in blue muttered. The other Doctor had just dashed into the TARDIS, and if he was planning what he thought he was planning, then the Earth was in for quite a ride.

Dalek Caan began to speak. "The prophecy must complete. I have seen the end of everything; it must surely happen, Doctor."

He thought about it for a moment. If they left the Crucible and took the Earth back home, how long before the Daleks were on their doorstep again? He looked up at Rose. "He's right. With or without a Reality Bomb, this Dalek Empire's big enough to slaughter the cosmos. They've got to be stopped."

Rose's eyes widened. "Okay, but just wait for the Doctor -"

"I _am_ the Doctor!" he said, suddenly enraged that she would think anything else. He stabbed at the controls. "Maximizing Dalekenium power feeds and blasting them back!" All the Daleks in the room exploded. A deep rumble from above confirmed that the same thing was happening all over the Crucible. The room started to shake - the Crucible was tearing itself apart.

"What have you done?"

He turned to his double, still full of righteous anger against the Daleks. "Fulfilling the prophecy."

More explosions, and the room around them was on fire. "D'you know what you've done?! Now get in the TARDIS! Everyone!" It seemed like good advice, given that if they stayed on the Crucible, they wouldn't survive long. He went, Rose following just behind him. His duplicate in brown was still shouting. "All of you inside! _Run!_ In, in, in, in, in!"

As everyone fled into the TARDIS, he counted them off, making sure that no one was left behind. "Martha! Donna! Jackie! Jack! Mickey!" 

That was everyone except the other Doctor, who was still just outside the door, yelling to Davros. "Davros, come with me! I promise, I can save you." 

The Doctor couldn't listen to any more, turning away from the door and walking to the console. If the fully-Time Lord version of himself wanted to offer asylum to the creature who had been within a hair's breadth of destroying the universe, then he wanted no part of it. He stepped over to Rose, hesitant. "Do you think it was a mistake?" he asked.

"What, destroying the Daleks?" She shrugged. "It's no different from what I did, once. Besides, they always come back."

He nodded. "Yeah. They do."

"And, off we go!" the other Doctor proclaimed, slamming the door of the TARDIS and jogging over to the console. 

"But what about the Earth?" Donna asked. "It's stuck in the wrong part of space!"

"I'm on it," he said. He called the Torchwood hub and Luke Smith, and before long they were set up. "Now then, you lot - Donna, hold that down," he said, pointing out one of the controls. "Mickey, you hold that - Cause d'you know why this TARDIS is always rattling about the place? - Rose, you know what to do." She was already in her usual position, and the Doctor simply trailed a hand affectionately across her back. "It's designed to have six pilots. And I have to do it with one co-pilot; used to have to do it single-handed! But not this time. Martha, keep that level," he said, positioning her hands on a lever. "Jack, there you go, steady that ..." He came to Jackie and stopped dead. "No, Jackie, no, not you, don't touch anything, just stand back." The Doctor moved her carefully aside as she glared at him. "Now we can fly this thing like it's meant to be flown. We're gonna fly Planet Earth back home! Right then, off we go!"

The Doctor in blue couldn't help noticing that the other Doctor hadn't spoken to him, hadn't looked at him at all. Which was maybe because he didn't _need_ instructions on how to help pilot the TARDIS, but was more likely because of what he had done to the Daleks. When the other Doctor took the sixth position at the console, he decided to make himself useful by circling the group, helping them to keep things steady, making small adjustments as the weight of the Earth momentarily strained the TARDIS' engines. He couldn't help smiling at the brilliance of seeing the console surrounded by friends, all of them happy, excited. He looked at Rose, standing next to the other Doctor at the console as she had so many times. It was disorienting, almost as if he were having an out-of-body experience, looking at himself from afar. He felt himself beginning to sweat. What was going to become of him now?

And then it was over - the Earth returned to its rightful place in the solar system. There was clapping and cheers and hugs, some of them even for him. Their friends seemed willing to celebrate with which ever Doctor was closer to hand, not worrying about the fact that the world now seemed to have one spare. He accepted Martha's enthusiastic kiss on his cheek and Jack's rather handsy bear hug and Mickey's friendly clap on the back, even as his eyes never left Rose for more than a moment. 

 

*** 

 

Donna walked out of the TARDIS and found that the Doctor had put his ship down in a lovely park. It was a perfect day: the sun was shining and it was warm, and Donna had never been so happy to set foot on solid ground. She had already called Phil and he was on his way to pick her up. The Doctor (the first Doctor, she reminded herself) stepped out with her and they began to walk slowly across the grass. 

"Sorry your one trip turned out to be ... not so much fun," the Doctor said, his understatement making her laugh.

"It's not like I would have been much better off on Earth. Not quite as up close and personal with Davros, but still scared, still in danger. At least at your side, knowing that you were there, I felt sure we would be all right."

He stopped and stared at her. "Really?"

"Of course," she said simply. "You're the Doctor."

He shook his head. "Wasn't me that saved us, in the end."

"Well, it was the other one. And isn't he you?" He didn't answer her, just started walking again. "So, speaking of that ... how's that going to work? I mean, if he's got all your memories, then doesn't he ...?" She trailed off, unsure how to ask what she wanted to ask.

"Doesn't he what?"

"Doesn't he see himself as Rose's husband too?" The Doctor sighed heavily and again, didn't respond. Donna could tell that he was uneasy; he probably didn't know how it was going to work either. "You still love each other so much," she said, trying to sound reassuring. "No matter what you've been through, no matter what you're facing now, you'll get through it, I know you will."

"I wish I could share your confidence," he said.

"Look, do you remember what you were like when she first came back to this universe all those years ago? Taking her to naff petting zoos and shouting at her and blaming her for things that weren't her fault and knocking her unconscious with your freaky telepathic sex - yes, I always knew about that," she added off his look. "You were complete rubbish as a partner, and what did Rose do? She stayed with you anyway. She loved you in spite of all that."

"This is way more complicated than anything we went through back then," he said.

"Perhaps it is," she said. "But both of you are wiser than you were then too, right?" Before he could respond, she spotted a familiar shape across the park. "Phil!" she shouted, waving frantically. She looked back at the Doctor, torn between running to greet her husband and finishing their conversation.

He waved her away. "Go on, I'll be fine."

With a last searching look into the Doctor's eyes, Donna turned and trotted to meet Phil halfway. With a gasp, she fell into his arms, letting him crush her in an embrace. "Thank you," he murmured into her hair, and she wasn't sure if it was addressed to her, or God, or the Doctor.

"I was so worried about you," Donna said through her tears.

" _You_ were worried about _me_?" Phil said, laughing. He pulled back and took her face in both of his hands. "I said to myself, 'I bet Donna's at the centre of the danger,' and where were you?"

"On board the Dalek station, facing down their insane creator," she admitted with a mixture of pride and sheepishness, her hands still clutching the arms of his suede jacket.

Phil ran his nose along the side of hers tenderly. "Did you help save the world?"

"Course I did, dumbo!"

He kissed her on the forehead. "You're completely mad, and I love you."

Donna lifted her head and brushed his lips with her own. "Let's go home."

 

*** 

 

"And this is our bedroom," Rose said, opening the door far enough so that her mother could peek inside, but Jackie predictably pushed her way in. 

"It's not half big, is it?" She looked around with interest, inspecting the furniture and all the little things on Rose's vanity table. Rose took the opportunity to make sure that nothing untoward was in evidence, such as the box of sex toys that she kept under the bed. Not that they'd seen the light of day much recently anyway.

"Well, the TARDIS is ... I'm not really sure how big it is. I've never seen all the rooms."

"In all these years?" her mother asked, and Rose just shrugged. How to explain the labyrinth that was the TARDIS? She only routinely went into about five or six rooms, and often ignored the rest of the ship. Jackie sat down on the bed and patted the space next to her, so Rose joined her. "So tell me about your wedding. Are there pictures?"

"No, mum, it wasn't ... it wasn't that kind of thing; it was sort of private. But lovely," she went on to say. "It was lovely."

"I have to say, I'm surprised. Not that the two of you share a bed or anything. He just didn't ever strike me as the sentimental sort, wanting to get married."

"He can be," Rose said wistfully.

Jackie looked back at the large bed and frowned. "I thought you told me once that he doesn't sleep."

"He does sometimes. A couple of hours a week, in little catnaps. Usually after ... you know," she said, blushing. Jackie had always been a little too eager to discuss sex with her, as if they were mates rather than mother and daughter, and Rose hoped she wasn't giving her mother an opening to launch into a series of personal questions.

"Mmm," Jackie said, seeming to understand her meaning. "He's as handsome as ever; doesn't he get any older?"

"He doesn't appear to age very quickly," Rose said, even less eager to discuss this topic than she was to discuss sex. "How's Pete?"

"He's good. Looking to retire soon, leave Vitex and Torchwood behind. I'm counting the days; it's aged him, working so hard."

"And Lily?"

"She's a teenager, so what do you think? She's a hormonal mess and a trial to us all, but we love her." Jackie sighed. "It's part of being a mother, dealing with all those phases. Speaking of which, what about you?"

"What _about_ me?" 

"What about children?" Jackie asked. "Or can you not, since he's not the same species as you?"

"We could if we wanted to. Not, you know, the natural way, because there would have to be some kind of genetic manipulation to form a proper embryo, as I understand it. But it's not impossible."

"You never wanted to?"

Rose shrugged. "Not really compatible with our lifestyle. And, I don't know, I've sort of never felt like anything was missing. It's not like I hate children or anything, but I have this amazing life with this wonderful man, and every day is an adventure, and I just ... nothing was lacking."

"Well, I guess we all make choices in life," Jackie said. "As long as you're happy, sweetheart." Rose flinched. Of course she wasn't, but not because she was childless. "And what about this other Doctor, now?"

"What about him?"

"What are you going to do about him?"

Rose stood up and began to pace the room. "How should I know?" she asked irritably. "It's not exactly a situation that I have any experience with, is it?"

"Sorry."

Rose instantly felt bad; here she was, trying to spend time with her mother, who she hadn't seen in over a decade, and she was shouting at her. "No, I'm sorry. It's just ... It's been a really long day." Jackie held out her arms, and Rose collapsed next to her again, letting her head fall on her mother's shoulder. Jackie stroked her hair, and the rush of feeling caused by that simple gesture made Rose's eyes fill with tears. "I missed you, mum."

When Jackie spoke, her voice was thick with emotion. "Missed you too, darling."

 

***

 

The Doctor in blue stood off to one side in the console room, his arms crossed across his chest, watching Jack, Martha, and Mickey chatting. The other Doctor was seeing Donna off and Rose was giving her mother a tour of the TARDIS, and he was at loose ends, the way things were going to play out going over and over in his mind. One by one, their friends would disperse. Jackie and Mickey would have to be taken back to their own universe, some time within the next twenty-four hours, if his calculations were correct. And then what? The three of them would be left together. Unless - and he felt himself break out in a cold sweat at the thought - the other Doctor just decided to exile him in Pete's World. Rose wouldn't let him do that, would she? Would she see him as her husband, just as much as the other Doctor, or would she see him as an inconvenience?

"That's quite the thousand-yard stare you've got going there, Doctor." Jack said. The Doctor started, not having noticed Jack approaching.

"I've got a lot to think about."

"Tell me about it. The logistics of a foursome, when three of the four are men, and two of the four are identical - there's a lot to work out," he said, laughing.

The Doctor chuckled in spite of himself. "You better watch it, Rose's mum is on this ship. I wouldn't want her to get wind of that aspect of her daughter's past sexual exploits. _You_ might not be able to die, but I can't regenerate."

Jack guffawed, but then stopped abruptly. "What do you mean, you can't regenerate?"

He tapped his chest. "One heart. One life, a human lifespan, and that's it. That's all I've got."

"I'm sorry. That must be an idea that will take some getting used to."

The Doctor shrugged. "What would you do if you suddenly found out you were mortal again, Jack? Would you be relieved, or disappointed?"

"I suppose a little bit of both."

"Yeah." He shook himself and changed the subject. "You headed back to Cardiff?" Jack had his vortex manipulator, and could teleport back home whenever he wanted.

"Yep, back to Torchwood, same as always." He looked at his watch. "Should probably get back soon, there's gonna be a ton of clean-up to do."

"Well!" The Doctor said with false cheer, holding out his hand. "Nice saving the universe with you as always, Jack."

Jack ignored his outstretched hand and hugged him, placing a kiss on his cheek. "If you need anything, if things here ... well. If you need help, then you know how to reach me."

The Doctor nodded, swallowing around a sudden lump in his throat. "Thanks, Jack."


	10. Chapter 10

"But when's Mummy getting home?" Sophie asked around a mouthful of ham sandwich. She pulled on one of the ringlets of hair that framed her face; with her hair and colouring, everyone proclaimed her the spitting image of her Aunt Tish.

"Soon," Tom said.

"Where is she, anyway?" Michael asked, mostly sounding annoyed that his routine had been interrupted by the end of the universe.

"With the Doctor," Tom replied, and Michael perked up. The prospect of seeing the Doctor, who he knew mostly from the fantastic stories that their mother spun for them, as well as a few brief meetings that he could remember, was obviously quite exciting for the seven-year-old. "She called, and he's bringing her home in the TARDIS." At this, Michael was positively vibrating in his seat; although he'd heard stories, he'd never actually seen the famous ship.

"What was she doing, Daddy?" Sophie asked. "Did Mummy make the noises outside stop?"

"She helped make them stop, yeah."

Sophie took a big drink from her cup, then looked up with a milk moustache and a very serious face. "I think Mummy is braver than Mulan," Sophie proclaimed, referencing her favourite Disney heroine. Michael looked at his father and rolled his eyes, as if to say, _kids._

"She is," Tom said, sitting down and pulling Sophie onto his lap. "Your mum is the bravest woman on Earth. She might be the bravest woman in the galaxy."

"The Doctor would know," Michael said sensibly. "He's been everywhere in the whole universe. He knows everybody who ever lived, anywhere."

"You know, how about you save a little hero worship for your old dad, hmm? You can't deny the bravery of making ham sandwiches; it's a risky undertaking."

Michael appeared dubious of that claim. "Next time, you can go save the world and Mum can stay here and make the sandwiches," he said.

Tom pulled Michael into a hug with his free arm, still holding his daughter with the other. He planted a kiss on the tops of both of their heads. "There isn't going to be a next time, okay? We're all safe now."

Both kids understood on some level that something very grave and important had happened, although Tom wasn't letting them watch the news. The Ixari war had been bad enough that summer, with Martha and Tom working alternating shifts at whatever hospitals were most shorthanded and the news broadcasts getting worse and worse. Sophie was often waking up in the night, sobbing for her mother, and Michael began changing from their bright, active boy into someone quiet and haunted. Things had finally been getting back to normal, and if Tom had his way, his children would never learn how close they had come to the end of everything, or how close their mother had been to the nexus of the storm. He wished that _he_ didn't know.

The sound of the TARDIS' otherworldly engines reached his ears, and he and the kids ran to see the blue police box materializing right in the front hallway, where the ceiling was high enough for it. That was, Tom had to admit, some precision navigation. The door opened and then the best sight in the world: Martha, still in her black jumpsuit, running toward them and gathering both of her children up in a hug, murmuring to them even as she met his eyes. Tom waited his turn, but when it seemed that his turn wasn't coming, that especially Sophie was not going to let go of her mother anytime soon, he joined them on the floor. He could see Martha's exhaustion in the strained lines around her mouth, in the dark circles under her eyes, but she smiled and smiled and leaned over to kiss him across the tops of their children's heads.

Tom was vaguely aware of the police box door squeaking again, and he looked up to see the Doctor walking out, shoving his hands in the pockets of his blue trousers. There had been a time when Tom had felt quite threatened by the Doctor; when your girlfriend used to be in love with a dashing, mysterious alien who travelled through time and space, what man wouldn't be? But now that was such ancient history; they had all been married for several years. The Doctor had held both of their children when they were newborns, and Tom had once spent an entire evening in a pub with Rose, drinking way too much and oversharing about their sex lives. Time marched on, he thought, giving the Doctor a wave.

"Glad to see you're all okay, Tom," the Doctor said, plopping down in a chair. Michael looked up and, disentangling himself from his mother, approached the Doctor shyly. "Michael? That can't be Michael, because I have it on good authority that Michael Milligan is a young boy, you are clearly a man, look at you! You'll be taller than me before long." Michael blushed, and then cackled with delight when the Doctor produced a coin from the boy's ear. Sophie even took notice at that, and loosened the grip she had around Martha's neck. "How would you two like to see the inside of the TARDIS?" the Doctor asked, clapping his hands together. 

And so it was that Tom soon found himself alone with Martha, and he had been a parent long enough to know an opportunity when he saw one and to take advantage of it. Still on his knees, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her soundly, opening his mouth against hers and letting one hand come to rest on the back of her neck.

After a few blissful moments Martha pulled away and grimaced. "I need to brush my teeth and shower in the worst way."

"Don't care," Tom murmured, trailing his mouth down to her jaw and neck. "I missed you."

"I wasn't actually gone that long," she whispered.

"Not the point." He stopped kissing her and regarded her seriously. "I was afraid I'd never see you again."

"Me too." And then it was Martha who was attacking him, combing her hands through his hair and biting his lower lip hard enough to hurt in a frankly delicious way.

"Want you," he gasped, pushing his pelvis against hers just in case there was any doubt what he meant.

Martha moaned. "I don't think the Doctor's going to be able to keep the kids busy long enough for a proper shag," she said, but in spite of her words she began to let her hands roam freely over his back and hips.

As if on cue, the Doctor stuck his head back out of the TARDIS, and seemed unsurprised to see them clutching each other on the floor. "I can probably keep them busy in the media room for about half an hour. Not enough time for music and candlelight, but probably enough for a hooray-the-world-didn't-end shag, don't you think?" Without waiting for a response, he disappeared again, leaving Martha and Tom with their mouths hanging open in shock.

"Have I mentioned lately that I love that man?" Tom said.

Martha was already halfway down the hall, pulling on the zipper of her jacket. "I'm going to take a very fast, very hot shower. When I get out, I want you naked and in the bed, got it?"

Tom Milligan did not have to be told twice. "Yes, ma'am," he said with a salute.

 

*** 

 

The Doctor watched as his part-human duplicate led the Milligan children through the console room, chattering to them the whole way. They were gobsmacked by the scale of the space, and even Sophie was old enough to sense the inherent wrongness of it, with her three-dimensional-thinking human brain. Neither of them noticed him leaning against the wall, which was just as well. He was already exhausted with people looking back and forth between him and the other Doctor with confusion.

Mickey rejoined him after another few minutes, which the Doctor had spent brooding. "Did you find Rose and Jackie?" the Doctor asked him.

"Yeah, but they're still in deep with the mother-daughter bonding. I left them to their tea and biscuits."

The Doctor frowned at him. "Well, you could have at least gotten us some biscuits."

"Sorry, mate." Mickey walked around the console, studying everything. "Seems like a lifetime ago, travelling with you." The Doctor made a noncommittal noise. "I should thank you though; I've made a pretty good life for myself in the other universe. Got to spend a few extra years with my Gran before she passed away, nice and peaceful. She spent her last years living in a mansion."

"Have you had any family of your own?" the Doctor asked.

"Not yet. Might though, if I ever get around to marrying my girlfriend."

"Don't waste time, Mickey. It'll fly by before you know it."

"That's pretty funny, coming from you. How many times did Rose tell me 'it's not like that' between you two? So either she was lying, or you were wasting time."

The Doctor smirked. "Touché."

"Well, at least you came to your senses after she came back to you." Mickey was still fiddling around with things on the console. "Must be hard though, seeing her in danger. Just today, thinking she was dead. How do you live like that?"

"Don't you work for Torchwood? You must get into more than your share of life-or-death scrapes."

"Well, yeah, but my girlfriend works as a secretary at a security systems firm."

"It's not called H.C. Clements, is it?"

"No, why?"

"No reason."

Mickey folded his arms across his chest. "You're just changing the subject."

The Doctor sighed heavily. "You're right, it's difficult. But I realized a long time ago that I can't protect her from all this. This is the life she wants. Yes, there's always going to be a part of me that would rather send her away somewhere to be safe than risk seeing her die before her time. Or for that matter, seeing her die when it _is_ her time. But a bigger part of me wants to share every day with her, even if some of them are like today. Even if there are a lot fewer days than I would like." The Doctor flinched internally, feeling a bit disingenuous. Everything he'd said was true; it was the creed he had lived by since deciding to let Rose into his life completely. Somewhere along the way, he had stopped being tempted to send Rose away; he wouldn't do that now, not really. But the nightmares that had started years ago, after he picked up a gun and shot the Master, were back to haunt him. Now they were filled with a burning command carrier and the screams of the dying.

Mickey took in what he'd said. "You're a lot smarter than you used to be."

"Wellll, I was only 902 back then, now I'm 916."

"Yeah, worlds of difference there," Mickey said, laughing.

"There are when you've spent most of that time married to Rose Tyler." He put his arm around Mickey and started walking out of the console room. "Remember that foosball table you used to like? I still have it. Fancy a game?"

Mickey grinned. "Only if you fancy getting your arse handed to you, Time Lord."

 

***

 

The part-human Doctor returned two very excited, tired children to the Milligan flat after almost an hour, loaded down with bags of jellybabies and bubbling with stories about the magical TARDIS. Martha, looking quite relaxed and pleased with herself, thanked him several times before he bid them goodbye and returned to the console room. It was empty, so he took it upon himself to move the TARDIS from Martha's flat into the Vortex. The next journey would be a tough one for his ship, and he thought an hour or two in the Vortex would do her good before the trip across the Void.

He was studying his palms when his counterpart came in, frowning. "You took her into the Vortex?" he asked.

"Yeah, well, I figured Martha wanted us out of her entry hall. Also -"

"Rest before the trip to Pete's World," the Doctor in brown finished too quickly. His hands flexed at his side, like he was aching to put them on the controls and reclaim possession of the TARDIS.

"Yeah." It was the first time they had been alone in the same room together, and he felt awkward, and then angry for feeling awkward. They stared at each other for a beat, and then the other Doctor turned and started to leave the room. "What else should I have done?" he said suddenly.

The other Doctor stopped, his back still turned, and then slowly spun around. "What?"

"With the Daleks. What else should I have done?"

"I'm not having this conversation."

The Doctor suddenly wondered what it would feel like to punch his duplicate, and whether it would hurt his hand more than it would hurt the other Doctor's face. "If you had a different plan, then tell me! How exactly were you going to turn the Daleks into big, fluffy puppies so that they never came after us ever again? Tell me!"

The other Doctor stalked over. "After everything we've been through, after everything we've done, you commit genocide! Like it's nothing!"

"It's not nothing! But the Daleks were trying to _destroy the universe._ Did you get that? Did you catch that little detail? Destroy every single race, every single planet, every speck of dust in the universe that wasn't Dalek. And they would do it again. And again."

"You aren't a god! You can't decide who lives and who dies!" The Doctor in brown had his teeth bared as he shouted in his duplicate's face.

"Like we did with the Ixari? Ten thousand lives for Rose - that's what's really eating away at you, isn't it?" The other Doctor didn't answer him. "By _not_ killing the Daleks, we're just deciding to let other races die. Races that the Daleks would subjugate at best, and exterminate at worst. There's no getting around deciding who lives and who dies in this situation, _Doctor._ And I'm sorry, but the Daleks aren't worth a smudge of dirt on the bottom of my shoe."

The other Doctor narrowed his eyes. "You're dangerous."

"You _made_ me!"

"Exactly. You were born in battle, full of blood and anger and revenge. You're like I was right after the end of the Time War - violent."

"Fine. Pitch me out into space then! Dump me off in Pete's World with Mickey and Jackie if I'm so bad! But at least admit it: this isn't about me committing genocide, this is about you looking for an excuse to get rid of me."

"Stop it."

The Doctor in blue felt his heart racing, his stomach roiling. "The truth is that I'm an inconvenience to you. You forget, I was still part of you when you decided to stop the regeneration, I know what you were thinking. You created me out of vanity."

"I said, stop it."

"You wanted to stay pretty for Rose, yeah? What is it that she says all the time? 'Your body is so perfect, Doctor. I love your eyes, I love your lips, I love the way your cock fits me just right -' "

 _"Shut up!"_

"I'm just a side effect of your little experiment to stay Rose's perfect partner."

"You're _me_! Would you have done it any differently?" the other Doctor yelled, his tone almost pleading.

The Doctor stopped, breathing heavily. He sank onto the jump seat, suddenly trembling with exhaustion. "No."

There was a long pause during which no one spoke. Finally the other Doctor muttered, "No one's pitching you or dumping you anywhere. You have free will, you can go where you like."

The Doctor narrowed his eyes. "What makes you think I want to go anywhere? This is my ship, as much as it is yours." _Rose is my wife as much as she is yours_ , he thought but didn't say.

Rubbing his hands across his face, the other Doctor didn't respond to that. "I'd better go tell Rose how much time she has until we have to take the others back," he said and left the console room. The Doctor watched him go before letting his head fall back against the seat. And then for the first time in his life, he dozed off without being aware he was falling asleep.


	11. Chapter 11

Rose splashed her face with cold water. Saying goodbye to her mother was going to be difficult, but she was so grateful for the few hours that they had spent together; it was more than she ever thought she would have. In the end, she hadn't told her mother anything about the problems she and the Doctor were having. The last thing Rose wanted was to leave her mother with worries about her that Jackie would have to carry for the rest of her life, never knowing the resolution. So she had smiled and painted a happy portrait of life on the TARDIS, and deflected any questions about the other Doctor. Any time she tried to wrap her brain around his existence, and what it would mean, she felt a sinking dread in the pit of her stomach.

She felt the TARDIS dematerialize, and dashed to hold onto the door frame; the Doctor had warned her it might be a bumpy ride crossing to the parallel universe. It was. When the TARDIS finally stopped, Rose pried open her fingers and went back to reapplying her makeup, covering up the fact that she had been crying, she hoped. 

"We're there."

Rose glanced at him, leaning against the doorway of their bedroom in his brown pinstripes. "I know, I felt it. I'm on my way."

The Doctor stood there, watching her. She could feel his eyes on her while she went through the last little bit of her routine, and by the time she turned to him, she was starting to worry about how very still he was. "What?"

"If this had happened years ago ..." He trailed off.

Rose frowned. "If what had happened years ago?"

"The metacrisis. If it had happened when we were first reunited, before I loved you too much, I might have left you here with him, let you live out a relatively safe and normal life together."

"You _what_?"

"He's got one heart, Rose. He isn't going to regenerate, he's going to grow old and die right along with you."

"So?"

"Isn't it even a little bit tempting? Take the human version of me, stay here with your family?"

Rose couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Do you really think so little of me, that I would just abandon you after all these years?" she said, her voice icy. Then suddenly rage turned to fear. "Or is that what you want? Do you just want to be rid of me?"

"No! Rose, nothing could be further from the truth, but you ..."

Before he could say anything else, she stormed out of the room. She arrived in the console room to find the Doctor in blue ushering Jackie and Mickey out the door. Rose followed on their heels out onto the beach that had figured into two of the biggest moments in her life. It was where she had said goodbye to the man she loved, and it was where she had realized there was a way to get back to him again. _Darlig ulv Stranden_ , the last place she had set foot in this universe. The sand was damp and springy beneath her feet and the wind was salty, stinging her cheeks.

"Well, fat lot of good this is. Back of beyond," Jackie complained. "Bloody Norway! I'll have to phone Pete. He's probably got his hands full with Lily's new dog. Did I tell you that, Rose? Lily got a terrier a few weeks ago, hyper little thing." Rose nodded.

The part-human Doctor smiled. "What did you name him?"

Jackie looked at him. "Doctor."

His voice rose to a pitch near what only Lily's dog would hear. "What?!" Rose, remembering the Doctor laughing years ago at the existence of a certain dog by the name of Rose, giggled in spite of her dark mood.

"I'm joking, you plum. He's called Max."

The other Doctor came out and joined their somewhat awkward circle on the beach. "Sorry to have to bring you back to Norway, Jackie," the Doctor in brown said. "This was always the weakest point in the breach, and it still is. The walls of this world are closing again, now that the Reality Bomb never happened. This universe is sealing itself off forever."

Jackie flung herself at Rose, tears starting all over again. Rose tried to comfort her, to be the strong one. "At least we got one day though, Mum, yeah?" Jackie nodded, sniffling. "You give Dad and Lily big hugs from me, okay? And you've got those pictures you took ..." Jackie had spent part of the afternoon snapping away with the camera on her mobile phone. "And if anyone tries to destroy everything in the universe again, we'll meet up for another reunion," Rose said with a tremulous laugh as she looked around. The original Doctor and Mickey had stepped away down the beach to give them some privacy. The part-human Doctor had wandered closer to the water.

Jackie held her at arm's length and studied her for a moment. "I'm so proud of you, Rose. I know it doesn't seem like it right now, with me bawling all over you, but it's worth it to me, knowing that you're leading the life you want to lead. I can tell that not everything is as perfect as you might want me to think, and that there are some things you aren't telling me, but no matter. I can also tell that you love that man, and that he loves you, so I know you'll find a way to work it out." Jackie glanced quickly at the Doctor in blue. "Somehow."

Rose didn't know what to say. "I'm gonna miss you, Mum."

"Me too, sweetheart."

The Doctor in brown was approaching. "Rose, we have to go. Every moment we spend here is just going to make the return trip that much harder."

Jackie pulled the Doctor into a hug. "You keep taking care of my daughter, you got that? Otherwise, I'll have to rip open the walls between universes and kick your skinny arse." The Doctor's eyes widened, as if he feared she could do just that. 

Rose gave Mickey a hug. "A proper goodbye this time," he commented dryly. "I think last time all I got was a phone call."

"Sorry about that. You take care of yourself, you hear?"

"You too, Rose. Have a fantastic life." He kissed her on the cheek and then backed away. "Nice to see you again, Doctor, uh, Doctors," he called. Rose turned to see them both, standing side by side at the doors to the TARDIS. With a final wave to her mother and Mickey, Rose squared her shoulders and walked back into her home.

Turning and watching the two of them closing the doors, Rose realized finally how exhausted she was. All she could do was sink onto the jump seat and watch as they cooperated in taking the TARDIS back through the closing rift, her stomach roiling throughout the very bumpy ride. When things smoothed out, she stood on shaky legs. "I'm going to bed," she said, and before either of the Doctors could comment, Rose walked out of the room.

 

***

 

The Doctor walked into his bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed, watching Rose sleep. They had been through so much and she wore the strain of it in her facial expression, her brow furrowed, her eyes darting back and forth under her eyelids. He felt his own eyes burning with unshed tears - he had thought he'd lost her, and he was just starting to process the fact that she was alive. He sank onto the bed at her side, unable to resist the urge to stroke her hair.

Rose's eyes snapped open.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor whispered. "I didn't mean to wake you."

"S'okay." She pulled herself up, sitting against the headboard. "Was having a bad dream anyway." 

"About before," he said, taking her hand in his. "I didn't mean it the way it came out. I know that you wouldn't just leave me, please believe that."

Rose raked her other hand through her sleep-tousled hair. "I do."

"I love you ... so very much. I really am sorry."

"Apology accepted." She looked toward the door. "Where's ... the other ..."

"I don't know. Around," he said, hating how petulant he sounded.

Rose sighed. "How are we going to do this? He's -"

"Can we not ... can we talk about that tomorrow?" He swallowed. "I thought I'd lost you today. I thought you were dead."

"I'm sorry."

The Doctor's mouth quirked up. "Not your fault. Wasn't like you wandered off and got into trouble."

Rose snorted, acknowledging his joke. "I know. I'm just sorry you had to suffer that way." She held her arms out and he moved into them gratefully, pressing his hands against the flat of her back and inhaling in the crook of her neck. She was warm, and the smell of her was so much like home that he almost sobbed. He was so lucky, so unaccountably lucky, that she was here. The Doctor realized that he was trembling. Rose murmured softly to him, running her hands up and down his spine. "Lie down with me," she said.

"Yeah," he rasped, taking his jacket, tie, and shoes off and crawling under the covers. Their arms went back around each other, holding on tight.

Rose soon drifted off to sleep, and it seemed more restful than it had been before. In spite of the fact that he hadn't slept in more than a week, the Doctor knew sleep would not come for him. Still, he was content to hold her, would be content to hold her all night. He let his mind wander. He imagined having sex with her, pressing her into the bed, burying himself inside her. He imagined her moans and gasps as he explored her intimately with his tongue. It had been several days since they had made love, and he felt himself starting to get hard thinking about it. He frowned; he should be able to control himself better than that. Closing his eyes and centring his mind, the Doctor took a few deep, slow breaths and suppressed his desires.

He had felt such clarity immediately after stopping his regeneration. Saving Rose's life, hearing her tell him she loved him just before she thought he was going to regenerate, it had put everything in perspective: his guilt about his actions in the war, Rose's worries about growing old. None of it mattered. What mattered was their love for each other. Now, the clarity was gone, muddied by the existence of his duplicate. It had been destined to happen from the beginning, this metacrisis, from the minute his path crossed with Rose. He had felt it at the time, timelines shifting as soon as he took her hand. Little had he known how much the future of the universe had depended on that moment. 

A metacrisis, he'd read about such things, but never seen one. Funny thing was, he had thought ... _oh no._ He had thought metacrises worked two ways.

He looked at Rose; she seemed no different. Unless ... Being careful not to wake her, the Doctor placed his fingers on her temples and looked into her mind. At first nothing seemed amiss, but then he looked deeper and there it was. Buried inside her brain - Rose's doom.

 

*** 

 

He spent a few hours just wandering the halls of the TARDIS, his one, strange heart hammering inside his chest. This was his home, had been his home for centuries, and he yet he felt like an outsider, an interloper. If he had thought he could have survived the loneliness, he would have stayed in Pete's World. He just wasn't that noble. Finally he found himself back in the console room with his duplicate. "I'm sorry," the Doctor said quietly.

The other Doctor didn't look up from where he was studiously working at the console, typing away and examining some readings on the monitor. From his angle, he couldn't see what they were. "Sorry for what?"

He shrugged. "Existing?"

The Doctor in brown didn't meet his eyes. "We wouldn't have gotten out of the Crucible without your existing. Rose would be dead, the TARDIS destroyed at the very least. I've no right to begrudge your existence."

"Yet you do."

"Don't start again, I don't have time for this right now."

"You can't pretend with me," he said, wondering why he was pressing for another argument. The Doctor felt like he was full to bursting with emotions, and with no way to let them out other than shouting at this man who was the cause of everything. "I know you. I _am_ you."

"Not exactly."

"Close enough."

The other Doctor huffed. "What's your point?"

"That our marriage was in enough trouble without this happening."

"That's not what I'm worried about right now." He continued to work.

"What are you worried about?"

The other Doctor finally looked at him. "I looked into her mind. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before - a biological metacrisis works two ways, it has to. There's a Time Lord consciousness hibernating in her brain, and when it wakes up …"

"It'll kill her," he said, his heart sinking. "But ... it might never happen. It might stay dormant forever."

The other Doctor suddenly slammed a hand against the monitor, sending it skittering away on its circular track. "You know it won't. It might be days, or months, maybe even years, but it will happen."

"So we figure out how to stop it."

"What do you think I've been working on? At this point, I can only think of one way to save her."

The Doctor in blue shook his head, horrified. "No. No way. She'll never allow it."

"She won't have a choice."

He felt rage bubbling up inside him at the coldness of his other self. "You could really do that? Rip all those memories out of her brain? Fifteen years; that's almost half her life! Every memory of us, every memory of our travels. She wouldn't even be Rose by the time you were done, she'd be a shell!"

"To save her life, I would do _anything_. I've proved that. You should know it. What's more, you should _agree_." The Doctor in brown finally approached him, looking into his eyes curiously. "Why don't you agree?"

He shrugged. "Dunno. Must be the humanity in me."

The other Doctor continued to study him. "How much of you is human?"

The Doctor shrugged again. "Not the architecture of my brain or my memories, those are all yours. My biology, my physical form – Time Lord on a human template. I'm male, obviously…"

"Obviously."

"A lot of my physiology is quite human. One heart, no respiratory bypass, human blood – A-positive, as it happens. Human hormones: testosterone, other androgens."

"Ugh." The other Doctor stuck his tongue out in distaste.

The Doctor squirmed a bit under his duplicate's scrutiny. "I haven't had a chance to examine everything," he said, which caused the Doctor in brown to cock an eyebrow at him suggestively. "I don't mean _that_ , I mean, I'd like to do some blood tests, see what my immune system looks like, see what my DNA looks like."

The other Doctor turned from him abruptly, returning to the console. "Well, you know where the lab is, have at it."

"And then what?" he asked, realizing that his duplicate had diverted him onto another topic of conversation. He shouldn't fall for that, that was _his_ trick! "What about Rose?"

The other Doctor sighed. "And then we look for another way to save her."


	12. Chapter 12

Rose woke late the following morning, feeling groggy from too much sleep and too many strong emotions. The TARDIS was quiet and she lay in bed for a while, remembering who was on the ship with her. Between saving the universe and reuniting with her mother, Rose had hardly had time to think about it yet. Now there was no avoiding it - there were two men on this ship, both of whom considered themselves the Doctor.

After a shower, Rose ventured out of the bedroom with no small amount of trepidation. Peeking into the control room, she saw brown trouser-clad legs sticking out from under the console and heard the buzz of the sonic screwdriver. She continued down the hall, and in the kitchen came upon the other Doctor, looking dishevelled and wearing a dressing gown she couldn't recall having seen before. He was buttering a slice of toast, and he looked up and smiled at her. "Hello."

"Hi." 

He pointed at the coffee pot. "He made your coffee earlier, looks like." The Doctor reached for the cabinet that contained her usual mug, but then hesitated and drew his hand back, as if he wasn't sure if he was taking a liberty by getting her coffee. It broke her heart a little. 

Rose walked over to stand next to him. "Where'd the dressing gown come from?"

"Wardrobe," he said, rubbing the back of his neck and yawning.

"Do you ... sleep?"

The Doctor shrugged. "I seem to require more sleep, if that's what you're asking. Slept for hours last night, it was strange."

"Where?" Rose poured herself some coffee and busied herself stirring cream into it, not meeting his eyes.

He frowned around a mouthful of toast. "What?"

"Where did you sleep?"

"Oh. Just ... a spare room. You know. The TARDIS has lots of rooms."

"That she does." Rose sank into a seat at the table. "Look, can you help me understand, you know, _you_?"

The new Doctor sat down across from her. "What do you want to know?"

"From your perspective, you're the Doctor." He frowned at this, opening his mouth to say something, but then quickly shut it again. "You remember all 900-odd years of experiences that he remembers, yeah?"

"Up to the point that he started to regenerate, yes."

"And then the next thing you know, you're waking up naked on the floor of the TARDIS in a human body?" 

He cleared his throat. "That's the gist of it, yeah." 

She laughed, but there was no humour in it. "You're handling it a lot better than I would be. I think I'd be going a bit mad."

"Who says I'm not?" He ran a hand through his hair. "Being human ... it's a bit dreadful, really."

"Oi! _I'm_ human, in case you've forgotten."

"And I have a new appreciation for how difficult that must be, believe me."

"What do you mean, dreadful?" Rose asked.

He didn't elaborate, glancing away from her. Rose looked at his hands on the table, and noticed that he kept touching the ring finger of his left hand with his thumb. It was a habit that the Doctor had, rotating his wedding ring with his thumb when his hands were idle. Except this Doctor had no ring. And then suddenly it hit her with the force of a blow to the chest; this wasn't just a man who was wearing the Doctor's face. This was the Doctor. 

Rose reached out and took his warm hand in hers. "I'm so sorry."

The smile this small display of affection brought out on his face was tremulous. "Don't be. It had to be this way, or the universe would have been destroyed. I've just got to figure out how to ... how to be me. How to be _this_ me."

They sat in silence for several seconds. "You're in love with me," Rose blurted out.

The new Doctor's eyebrows went up. "Of course I am." He let go of her hand. "That makes you uncomfortable."

Rose huffed in frustration. "Only because there are two of you. I don't know how to be married to two different people! Or, two of the same people, whatever."

He stood up and backed away from the table. "Do you want me to go?"

"Go?"

"Leave."

"What? No, I ... that wouldn't be fair, I would never ask you to do that."

He folded his arms across his chest defensively. "Whether it's fair isn't the point. Is it what you want?"

Rose stared into his familiar brown eyes. "No."

He tilted his head to the side. "Why not?"

"Because ... because I love you." It was a truth that she didn't understand until it spilled from her lips. The Doctor just stared at her, his mouth slightly ajar.

Before either of them could say anything, the other Doctor breezed into the room, babbling at full steam about where he thought they should head off to next. Rose figured she was probably hiding her surprise quite poorly; was this the way he was going to handle things? Act like things could just continue on as usual, the three of them travelling together where before there had been two? On second thought, it wasn't that surprising. This is what the Doctor did when he was out of his depth - he ran. 

 

*** 

 

The part-human Doctor closed his bedroom door and leaned his head against it, sighing audibly. He hated this, this bone-deep exhaustion that came from intense physical activity. The last few days had been one trip after another, each more death-defying than the last. They had saved an ancient civilization, rescued a princess, and stopped a trade conflict from turning into a war, all with the usual running for their lives. He just didn't remember it ever being so draining before. Did Rose feel this way? No wonder she slept so much.

The fact was, his human body was weak. It tired more easily, bruised more easily, and he was fairly certain that it smelled worse. Speaking of which, bathing was probably a good idea, he decided, before he collapsed into a dead sleep for several hours.

In spite of all his complaints, he couldn't fault the other Doctor's method for dealing with the awkward situation they were all in. They'd all been too busy to talk about anything other than how to handle the latest crisis, a fact that gave him no small measure of relief, because he wasn't any more prepared for it than his duplicate was. When Rose had told him she loved him, he had felt like his single heart would burst, but it didn't change the fact that she also loved the other man, the Time Lord. And what was _he_ compared to that? An echo. A shadow. If Rose didn't already know that, she'd figure it out soon enough.

The room he was using had been the one that Martha had inhabited during her stay on the TARDIS. He had considered going to Rose's old room, but immediately quashed that idea. The last time he had been in there for any length of time had been the first night he and Rose had made love, and the memory of that night was still intense. Trying to sleep there was a torture he had wisely decided not to exact on himself. Picking up a towel, he went into the en suite and turned on the shower as hot as he could tolerate.

Once he was standing under the pounding spray, the Doctor rolled his shoulders, working out the kinks and soreness. He looked down at his side, where a purple bruise flowered just below where his left hipbone jutted out, the result of a rather unfortunate fall while escaping a handful of murderous pursuers. Apparently on top of everything else, he was clumsy. He tilted his head back, letting the water sluice through his hair, and opened his mouth to exhale a long, slow breath. 

As always seemed to happen when he closed his eyes, he saw Rose. In spite of what she might think, she was as lovely as she ever had been. Her smile made his stomach lurch and the touch of her hand made his skin flush hot in reaction. It was a torturous irony that he found himself in a body that responded so intensely to her, but couldn't act on it. Even now, thinking thoughts that were not even overtly sexual, he felt himself getting hard. Which of course led to thoughts that _were_ overtly sexual, like what her full lips felt like surrounding his cock, and how exquisite it was when she ran her tongue along the underside of it.

Without any conscious decision to do so, he let his fingers brush over his erection, then closed his hand around it with a stifled groan. This ... this was not something that he did. Not that he didn't touch himself on occasion, but only as part of his sex life with Rose. She liked it, liked to watch as he pleasured himself, and at the thought of that he began to stroke himself slowly, with less pressure than his body really wanted. Time Lords did not need to masturbate. He liked sex a great deal, of course; even grudgingly admitted that after so many years with Rose, he needed it sometimes. What he'd never had was this base physical need for release. It was yet another way that he was weaker than his counterpart, his former self. With gritted teeth, he let go of his cock and picked up the soap.

He wondered if the other Doctor was making love to her right now. He lathered soap over his arms and chest, imagining her on her elbows and knees on their large bed as he pounded into her from behind, thrust after thrust, hot and tight and wet. He could almost hear the way she would cry out with each stroke, pushing back against him, her arse pressing against his hips. The feeling in his groin had become a full-fledged ache, and let his soapy hand fall again to his cock. This time he didn't hesitate, closing his fist around his length and stroking faster, moaning at the slick friction of skin on skin. In almost no time at all, he was on the edge of climax - this body was barely under his control. He leaned against the wall of the shower, his breath coming fast, his fist moving back and forth. His imagination ran through a catalogue of his experiences with Rose - licking the salty sweat from between her breasts, digging his fingers into the skin of her hips as he drove into her, the look in her eyes as she watched Jack fuck him, the movement of her jaw under his fingers as she sucked his cock.

He clenched his teeth and came hard, his whole body trembling. The Doctor gasped in shock; it wasn't that it felt _better_ than it had as a Time Lord, it was just that there was a sort of animalistic release to it that he'd never experienced before. No wonder humans were so obsessed with sex if their feelings were this intense. He sighed, his exhaustion creeping back over him along with an emptiness and melancholy. His fantasies of Rose, based in reality as they may have been, were just that - fantasy. He'd likely never have the chance to make love to her again. For the first time, he wondered if staying on the TARDIS had been was the right decision, and if there were worse things than being separated from Rose.

 

***

 

Rose had come to find gardening relaxing, a fact that occasionally made her wonder if she was becoming an old woman; wasn't gardening an old woman's hobby? Nonetheless, it calmed her. When the Doctor, the original Doctor, found her in the TARDIS garden, Rose had dirt under her fingernails and was finally starting to feel like herself. She smiled at him. "Hello."

"Hi." He strolled over to where she was kneeling on the ground, his hands in his pockets. Crouching down, the Doctor put on his specs and examined what she was planting. "When did we get _Crucellium xyrenoxia_ flowers?" 

"I got the seeds at that market on Hyfilia a few months ago and grew them up in pots; I'm just transferring them to this part of the garden now that I've decided I like them." 

The Doctor brushed his fingers over the petals delicately. "The Hyfilians dry the blossoms and use them to make a sort of tea."

"Is it good?"

"Yes, it's lovely," he said softly, his eyes still focused on the flowers.

"Well, I'll have to try that."

He looked at her then, and reached out to stroke her cheek with the same delicacy. " _You're_ lovely."

"Thank you," she said simply, then went back to her task. 

After a moment, the Doctor picked up an extra trowel and began helping her. They worked silently for half an hour, until all the flowers were in the ground. Rose had long since gotten used to the idea that there could be things like soil and growing plants on the TARDIS, as well as the fact that the TARDIS could create different frequencies of sunlight in different parts of the garden, depending on the planet of origin of what was growing there. When they were finished, Rose stood up and brushed off her jeans, putting her tools away and washing her hands in a small sink - more of a fountain, really - next to the door. The Doctor joined her, letting his fingers brush against hers in the water. 

Rose met his eyes, deep brown pools of desire, and she allowed him to pull her into a kiss. His cool mouth opened against hers and she gasped at the way her body instantly responded. In her head, she might be feeling confused and hesitant, but the rest of her was willing to ignore that for the moment. She clutched the arms of his brown suit with damp hands, meeting his deep kiss with equal fervour. After a long time, he broke the kiss. "Let me take you to bed."

"Okay," she said, feeling a little bit light-headed. They clasped hands and she let him lead her through the halls to their room.

The Doctor led her over to sit on the bed and resumed kissing her, his hands coming up to cradle the sides of her face. "I love you," he murmured.

"I love you too."

The kisses started gentle but quickly turned frantic. One hand slipped under her shirt, cupping her breast through the bra. Rose caressed his chest, running her hand down the smooth silk of his tie to his groin. He certainly was aroused, moreso than he usually was this early in the proceedings. She grinned against his mouth, squeezing him through his trousers and eliciting a very satisfying groan. The Doctor moved his lips to her jaw and then her neck, trailing wet kisses and sucking briefly at each point where his mouth met her skin. "You're _mine_ ," he growled against her neck. "Only mine."

Rose froze, and then pushed him away gently. "Wait. What do you mean by that?"

His eyes were heavy-lidded. "What?"

"'Only mine.' Why did you say that?" she asked, sitting back against the headboard.

"I don't know, does it matter?" He ran a hand through his hair in frustration.

"It does if you're trying to ... I don't know, assert your dominance over the other you," Rose said.

Hie eyebrows shot up. " _I'm_ your husband, Rose."

"But ... that's not fair! He has all the same experiences, all the same memories of our time together. He's as in love with me as you are." She stood up and backed away from the bed. "I can't do this," she whispered, shaking her head.

"What are you saying?" the Doctor asked, standing and facing her. 

"How is this not ... how can I make love to you? Isn't it betraying _him_?"

The Doctor's face fell. "Right. Sorry. I didn't mean to ... _presume_." His tone was restrained, but she could hear the bitterness underneath. "I'll just go." His back held stiff, he walked out of the room.


	13. Chapter 13

Rose ran after the Doctor and grabbed his arm. "No, wait. Don't leave. We can't keep avoiding this, we have to talk." He had stopped, but he didn't look at her. "Please. If you love me, _please_."

He turned. "Yeah, all right." They went back into the bedroom and Rose closed the door.

"I love you, I mean that," Rose said. "But we were having problems before the metacrisis, and I really think we need to talk about them."

"Fine," the Doctor said, sinking into an armchair. "Where do you want to start?"

Rose sat on the bed, facing him. "I know you still have a lot of guilt about the Ixari war, about what you did. I'd like you to admit that you resent me a little bit for putting you in the position where you had to make that choice."

"Love, it wasn't your fault -"

"I know that. _You_ know that. But feelings aren't always rational, and I think you resent me a little. And that just makes you feel more guilty, because you _know_ it isn't rational."

The Doctor put his head in his hands. "Ten thousand lives, Rose," he said, his words muffled. 

"I know. I'm sorry." She took a deep breath. "But pulling away from me won't solve anything."

"I wasn't pulling away from you today," he said angrily. "I was trying to be with you, and _you_ were the one that stopped it."

"I'm sorry," she said again, "but you have to admit, I'm in a difficult -"

"Can we talk about the fact that _you_ resent _me_ for not aging?" he asked.

"I don't resent you, I just worry about what it's going to be like when I'm an old woman, and you look, what, ten years older than you do now? At most? And that's assuming that you don't regenerate into an even younger-looking bloke in the meantime. I have a hard time imagining you wanting to be with me under those circumstances. I know that you'll stay with me out of loyalty, but -"

" _Loyalty?!_ If that's what you think it would be, then you don't understand my feelings for you at all!" The Doctor launched himself out of the chair, pacing across the room. "Rose, if you don't trust me, if you don't trust in my love for you, then what are we doing?"

"I do, but -"

"You're the one that always said it didn't matter to you." His voice dropped, raspy with emotion. "I spent _years_ working to come to terms with the fact that I'll have to watch you die. And now you're making it sound like I'm going to be impatient to be rid of you!" He ran a hand through his hair. "If that's the way you feel about it, you should have taken me up on my offer to stay in Pete's World with _him_."

"How can you say that?" Rose gasped, standing up and facing him, fists clenched at her side.

"Admit it, Rose, he's the man for you! He won't feel guilty about the Ixari; he wiped out the Daleks without blinking an eye! And he'll grow old right along with you. He's perfect."

"Stop." Tears sprang to her eyes. "Is that what you want?" she asked in a tremulous voice, the beat of her heart thundering in her ears.

"I just want you to be happy, Rose," he said, sounding defeated. The Doctor dropped onto the bed and rubbed his hands over his face. "And it's been pretty bloody obvious lately that I'm not making you happy."

 _And I haven't been making him happy either,_ Rose thought. Suddenly, she was the one who needed to flee. "I'm sorry," she whispered, and turned quickly to leave the room.

Rose wandered the halls of the TARDIS for a several minutes, feeling like she was in a fog. She'd tried to make things better, to finally talk honestly about everything that was bubbling under the surface, and all it had done was to make things worse. Eventually, she found herself standing in front of the other Doctor's bedroom door. Taking a deep breath, Rose knocked.

 

***

 

The Doctor sat up in bed, disoriented. He didn't think he'd ever adjust to all this sleeping, and his failure for a moment to place himself in space or time proved it. Only when the knock came again did he understand what had awoken him in the first place. Popping up out of bed, he shambled to the door and opened it to see Rose's tear-streaked face looking back at him.

"I woke you up," she said, taking in his pyjamas and, he assumed, terribly dishevelled hair. 

"Yeah, but -"

She turned away to leave. "Sorry, I'll just -"

"No!" He scrubbed a hand over his head, really hoping that his brain would kick in and start working soon. "Don't go. You look like you need ..." He didn't know what she needed. "Come in, please."

Rose eyed him for a moment, and then stepped beyond him into the spartan bedroom. He realized suddenly that there wasn't even a chair for her to sit on, but she didn't seem to care, plopping down on the rumpled bed and crossing her legs. "Are you sure it's okay? You look tired."

He sat on the edge of the bed, giving her some space. "It's okay, I promise. Are you all right?"

She barked a laugh. "No."

The Doctor's fingers itched to thread through hers, but he restrained the impulse. He started to ask what was wrong, but realized he probably knew. "I'm sorry."

"We had a fight," Rose said, sighing. "I sort of ... stormed out."

"If you're mad at him, shouldn't you be mad at me too?" the Doctor asked.

"You tell me."

"What was the fight about?"

"The usual," she said, studying her hands. Then she looked up at him suddenly. "He said you wouldn't have as much guilt about what happened during the war as he does. Is that true?"

He had no idea how to answer that question. He had no idea if he even _had_ the answer. "I ... maybe."

Rose frowned. "I thought you were the same man."

"We are and we're not. Being part human, it gives me a different perspective on things." He struggled to figure out how to put into words what he hadn't even fully thought through yet. "As a Time Lord, I felt like I had so much power, so much responsibility, sometimes it was all I could see; it blinded me to everything else. It took you, shining brighter than the brightest star, to drown all of that out." He blushed at his overly romantic words. "It was wonderful and, and terrible. What happened during the war, the decision that I made ... it was one of my worst nightmares made real."

"So what's different now?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I'm not as arrogant? Not as certain that if I hadn't made the decision I made, the Ixari wouldn't have died anyway. Fact is, UNIT probably would have found a way, with or without me."

The Doctor was surprised when this answer made Rose look more melancholy. "Maybe he's right," she whispered.

"About what?"

"That you and I wouldn't have the problems that he and I have."

The Doctor's stomach flipped, mostly with trepidation, but with a little seed of excitement that shamed him. "I don't think it's as simple as that," he said, his voice strangled. "He _said_ that?"

Rose nodded. "I'm just so tired of ... I'm so tired." A tear slipped down her cheek and she wiped it away.

Instinctively, he pulled her into his arms, and only a second or two afterwards wondered if he'd stepped over a line. It seemed not; Rose buried her face in his shoulder, her arms around his neck. He breathed her in, exhaling with a shudder. She was completely intoxicating.

He wasn't sure how long they sat there, Rose's knee poking awkwardly into his ribs. At some point he became aware that she had shifted slightly so that her face was against his neck, and he wondered if she could feel the pounding of his heart through the pulse point there. Then, _oh_ , her dry lips were against his neck, his chin, the stubble of his cheek. The Doctor turned toward her - it was impossible to do anything else - and just like that they were kissing. It was new and yet so very familiar. He tried to hold back, to be restrained, but her mouth opened, warm and wet, and he was lost. He whimpered in the back of his throat, returning her kisses helplessly. Rose's hands went into his hair, combing through it and scraping his scalp with her fingernails. The response from his body was sudden and powerful, and it was all he could do not to press her down to the mattress.

He brought his hands to either side of her face, and was shocked to feel moisture against his palms. She was crying. Even as she kissed him so urgently, she was crying. He wrenched his mouth away from hers.

"Rose -"

"Don't, just ... I don't wanna talk." Her hand came up and slipped under the vest he was wearing, caressing his chest.

It was so tempting to give in. With an agonized groan, he pulled away, backing up against the headboard. "Rose, I want you very badly. Of course I do. But you came in here because of problems you're having with the other me, and that isn't a reason to do this. It won't do anything but hurt all of us, in the end." 

Rose rubbed her face with both hands and then smoothed down her hair. "God, you're right. I'm sorry." 

"Don't be sorry." He reached out and threaded his fingers with hers. "Do you want to ... sleep here tonight?"

She looked relieved. "Yeah."

"I think there are some clothes that Martha left behind over there," he said, pointing to the closet. "Probably something you could wear." While Rose changed, he got back under the covers and took several deep breaths, trying to put sex with Rose as far from his mind as he could. It didn't work at all. After a few minutes, she got into bed with him and snuggled up against his side. It was an hour after she had fallen asleep that he finally gave up on getting any more sleep himself. He got up, dressed, and left the room.

 

***

 

Fighting with Rose always led the same place for the Doctor: to his workshop. When the Doctor in blue walked in, he was sitting at the largest table pretending to be calibrating the electro-gravimetric flux neutrometer, but really wasn't doing much of anything except brooding.

"What are you doing here?" the Doctor asked him.

"Thought I'd realign the temporal power couplings," said the other Doctor as he rooted around in one of the many toolboxes scattered about the room. He was noticeably dishevelled: barefoot and in his shirtsleeves, his hair mussed like someone had been running her hands through it. The Doctor picked up faint traces of Rose's hair conditioner in the air, and it made him want to punch the other Doctor in the face.

"I did it already," he responded.

The other Doctor dropped the spanner he had picked up back in its box. "Oh."

"Any idea where Rose is?" the Doctor asked, trying and almost succeeding at nonchalance.

"She's sleeping."

It was a good thing that the sonic screwdriver was encased in reinforced titanium, otherwise it would have been quite suddenly broken. "I see."

The other Doctor sighed, running a hand through his own hair. "Nothing happened, if that's what you're worried about. We talked for a bit and she fell asleep in my room, that's all."

"Oh." He aimed the sonic screwdriver at the neutrometer and let the buzzing sound fill the space.

The other Doctor smirked. "You realize I can tell that you're not really doing anything there, right?"

The Doctor pocketed his screwdriver and looked up at him. "I should tell you ... You should know that we haven't ... I haven't been to bed with her since you _arrived_."

"Huh." The other Doctor was obviously surprised by that little revelation. "Well, this is a fine mess, isn't it?"

"It would be funny to an outside observer, I suppose." He cocked his head at his other self, then stood up and approached him. "You smell odd."

"Oh, thanks," he said, edging away.

"No, I don't mean bad, I just mean ... odd." The Doctor followed him as he backed toward the wall. "Human hormones and pheromones. You reek of them."

"Oh, cut me some slack, eh? She's my wife too, and I can't help it if I want her. If I miss her."

"Course you can't. And you're so ... _human_. No barriers at all, no way to suppress what you're feeling. It must be unbearable."

"I can bear it." he said darkly.

The Doctor was still standing in the other man's personal space, and he wasn't even sure why. Almost against his will, he leaned in toward his duplicate and inhaled. "You smell like _her_. I mean, not really, because she's all womanly and the smell of her arousal is distinctly hers, as you well know. But there's something ... something of her in the way you smell."

The other Doctor looked him in the eye. "You talk about mental barriers, but the truth is you haven't tried to erect yours in more than a decade. Are you even able to?" The Doctor didn't answer. "You're very lonely, aren't you? You need her."

"So do you."

He wasn't sure who moved first, but their lips met almost violently, mouths opening against one another and tongue stroking tongue. He felt the other Doctor's hands on the lapels of his suit jacket, hauling him closer. Their arms went around each other, hands grasping, fingers threading into hair. Their pelvises met and he felt the exquisite pressure of the other man's erection against his own. The Doctor failed to suppress a groan. Eventually, the kiss trailed off, their mouths still close.

"This is ... a bit incestuous," his duplicate mumbled. 

"Nah, it's not like we're brothers, that would be disgusting," the Doctor responded. "If anything, it's masturbatory."

The other Doctor was still breathing heavily. "If I want you, it's just because of that little part of me that's Rose."

"And if I want _you_ , it's only because you're putting out her pheromones and I'm not so good at shielding myself against that."

"It's certainly not because we're narcissistic pricks."

"No, certainly not," said the Doctor in brown.

"Good."

"Good." The Doctor closed his eyes, feeling the other Doctor's mouth on his once again.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a moderately subtle crossover with another scifi show in this chapter. Can you spot it?

Without warning, the Doctor in brown found himself up against the wall, his mouth plundered by his double, his shirt untucked and hands roaming restlessly over his torso. It was odd; they were like his own hands and yet not, the shape and strength of his, but much warmer. It was alarming how arousing that combination of the familiar and the strange was. The other Doctor's hips bucked against his, and he was momentarily blinded with how badly he wanted sex. He really had forgotten how to suppress his sex drive, like it was a muscle that had atrophied from disuse. The Doctor spun, swapping their positions and pushing the other Doctor against the wall. He moved his mouth to the neck of his duplicate, sucking and biting him on the spot that he most liked when on the receiving end of such attentions. 

He deftly unfastened the Doctor's blue trousers and drew the zip down. Pulling the waistband of his pants away from his body, he gripped his straining erection. The other Doctor moaned helplessly, his head knocking against the wall behind them, his hands clutched into fists at his side.

"You are ... _very_ hard," he said, smirking as he began to squeeze and stroke the other man's cock.

"New body. Oh, god," he gasped, his hips rocking in time with the Doctor's hand.

"Have you touched yourself yet?" the Doctor asked him, maintaining a relentless rhythm.

The Doctor in blue met his eyes. "Yes."

"Thinking of Rose?"

"Yes."

He stopped stroking and pointedly licked his palm before returning to his task, squeezing tighter and pumping his fist up and down. "Thinking about fucking her? About being inside her wet heat?"

"Ah ... god ... yes." The other Doctor's eyes squeezed shut and he moaned deep in his throat. Three more strokes and his double came, shooting onto his hand and shirt. "Sorry," he gasped.

The Doctor looked at the sticky mess on his hand and licked it experimentally. "Human," he said, wiping the rest on the bottom of his already-soiled shirt. He leaned over and kissed the other Doctor, still feeling incredibly aroused. The Time Lord slipped his hand around and under the waistband of the other man's pants, squeezing his arse and pulling their pelvises against one another again. His double reached down and began to unfasten the Doctor's trousers, intent on returning the favour done to him. The Doctor broke their kiss. "Take your trousers off and turn around."

His eyes widened. "What?"

"You heard me." The other man didn't move. "Come on, it's not like you've never done it before."

"Yeah, but not in this body," his double said, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed nervously.

He put his lips against the other Doctor's ear. "I promise I'll be gentle," he whispered, and felt his duplicate shiver. "Besides," he said with a smirk, "I know you like it ... because _I_ like it."

They stared at each other for a beat, then his double dropped his trousers and pants and stepped out of them. He slowly turned, putting his hands flat on the wall. "Somewhere, Jack Harkness is getting a knob on and doesn't know why," he said dryly.

The Doctor laughed, pulling his cock out and spitting into his hand a few times. A few strokes and he stepped up close behind the other Doctor, pulling his shirt up out of the way. Using his hand, he moved his cock up and down until he felt the other man's entrance, then he pushed, just slightly, with his hips. "Relax," he murmured, and he saw and felt the man's tension ebb away. He pushed again, the head of his cock slipping inside. His duplicate hissed in pain. "Sorry."

"S'okay. Just ... give me a second." He waited, and after a moment he felt the other man push backward with his hips and gradually work himself onto the Doctor's cock. He let his hands settle on the other Doctor's hips, resisting the temptation to jerk him back and force himself the rest of the way in. When he was buried completely, he let out a sigh, leaning against the other Doctor's back. "Go ahead," he said, his single heart thundering.

He pulled out an inch and gently pushed back in, going slow and then gradually lengthening his strokes. "Okay?" he asked breathlessly.

"Yes," the other Doctor groaned, driving back with his hips and matching his rhythm, his elbows locked as he braced himself against the wall. "Yes ... fuck me ... please, more." The Doctor looked over the other man's shoulder and saw that he was already half-hard again.

He moved faster, pushing harder, felt himself starting to come apart. He remembered the first time he had fucked Rose this way. She had been willing but nervous, unsure what it would feel like. He was gentle, so gentle as they lay on their sides, reaching down and filling her with his fingers even as he fucked her with his cock, and she had come so hard that her cries were like sobs. Thinking of her brought him to his own orgasm suddenly, and he shouted with relief as he buried himself inside the other Doctor a final time. 

They stood there for a while, his duplicate leaning against the wall and him pressing against his back. "Feel better?" the other man finally said.

He pulled out and tucked himself away. He hadn't even taken off his suit jacket; he was almost presentable, save for the semen drying on his shirt. "Suppose I do."

The other Doctor retrieved his trousers and put them back on. Rubbing his neck, the Doctor fixed his gaze on the ceiling. "So ..."

"I've been thinking more about Rose's brain," the other Doctor interrupted quickly, and the Doctor was relieved to have a diversion from post-coital awkwardness with his duplicate. "Do you think, maybe that remnant of what made her Bad Wolf could help us?"

The Doctor sat down and put his feet up on a workbench. "How?"

"Well, for one thing, she once held the Time Vortex inside her mind. And yes, it would have killed her, but in comparison to that, a Time Lord consciousness is nothing! Maybe her mind could take it." 

"I doubt it."

"It's worth checking, don't you think? We could do a full opticocerebral scan, and that might tell us more." The Doctor in blue folded his arms across his chest.

The Doctor picked a random spare part up off the table and started passing it from hand to hand. "I suppose it might. And it's non-invasive, so there's little risk. But we don't have that kind of equipment on the TARDIS."

"Yes, I _know_ that," the other man said, rolling his eyes. "So we go to a planet where they do have that kind of equipment."

"How are we going to explain it to Rose?"

"We could tell her part of the truth. Tell her that we want to make sure there were no lasting effects from the metacrisis, and just not tell her what we fear could happen."

The Doctor sighed. "I suppose."

"Do you have a better idea?" he responded with a raised eyebrow.

"No."

"All right then." The Doctor in blue leaned back against a drafting table, his hands shoved into his pockets. "We can't force her to choose one of us, you know," he said, abruptly changing the subject. "We can't turn this into a competition."

"I know." The Doctor didn't mention that he had no desire to turn it into a competition anyway, because he was fairly certain he would lose.

"So about the other thing ..."

"What other thing?"

"The fact that Rose feels like being with one of us will betray the other."

"Ah." The Doctor steepled his fingers. " _That_ other thing."

"There's an obvious solution, which, based on what happened here tonight, I assume you wouldn't have a problem with."

The Doctor frowned at that. "A threesome isn't going to magically solve our problems. There's a lot more to it than sex."

His duplicate's resulting grin was somehow both guileless and seductive. "No, but it's as good a place to start as any, don't you think?"

 

***

 

Rose woke up in an unfamiliar room, and it took a few moments before she remembered where she was and why. The Doctor had left her at some point, and she remembered with embarrassment the way she had thrown herself at him, all because she had fought with the other one. Both of them were probably angry with her, and for good reason. With a heavy sigh, she dragged herself out of bed and prepared herself for a walk of shame back to her own room.

Fortunately, she ran into neither of the Doctors in the halls of the TARDIS. After a long shower and rejecting the idea of hiding out in the bedroom for the rest of the day, Rose headed out, prepared to face the music. What she found when she walked into the kitchen was not at all what she expected.

"Rose!" The Doctor in brown grinned widely at her, showing a lot of teeth. "Come in, sit down. I, well, _we_ made you breakfast." He nodded his head at the other Doctor, who was pouring coffee into her favourite mug. Her first Doctor held a chair out for her, which she sank into, in a complete state of confusion. After another minute and a flurry of activity from both Doctors, Rose had juice, coffee, eggs, and toast sitting in front of her. 

She looked from one of them to the other. "What ... what's all this?"

Her first Doctor sat down across the table from her. "We just wanted to do something nice for you, that's all." His voice was soft and earnest. "I'm so sorry about last night."

She looked up at the part-human Doctor, and he smiled a shy smile. "Now eat up!"

With another glance at both of them, Rose obeyed. She couldn't imagine what the two of them had possibly said to one another to result in this truce. Not that they had been fighting, at least as far as she was aware; what they _had_ been doing was ignoring each other, only speaking directly to one another when absolutely necessary. And now they were ... making breakfast together? It defied understanding. They joined her at the table, and the three of them ate in silence for a few minutes.

"So it occurred to me," the Doctor in brown said, "a metacrisis can be a physically traumatic experience for both parties, but in all the excitement of the universe ending, I didn't think to examine you properly. Either of you," he added, glancing at the other Doctor. 

"I feel fine," Rose said as she spread marmalade on a piece of toast.

"Even still," the first Doctor said, "it would put my mind at ease."

Rose shrugged. "Okay, fine. Let's head over to the infirmary after we're finished eating."

"Well, I don't really have the proper equipment here, not for a thorough examination of your brain. We're going to go to a hospital."

Her mouth dropped open. "You're taking me to a hospital? _You?_ What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing!" he said hastily. The Doctor in blue stood up from the table and walked over to the sink. "I just want to do an opticocerebral scan and rule out any complications from the metacrisis. That's all."

"What about _his_ brain?" she said, indicating the second Doctor.

"Oh! Certainly, his brain too. Can't be too careful." He put his hand over hers. "Don't worry, you're fine. Finer than fine. _Molto bene!_ "

The other Doctor whirled. "I'll go set a course," he said, leaving the room abruptly.

Rose narrowed her eyes. "What's going on with you two?"

"No, nothing, it's ..." When his hand came up to rub his neck, she knew she'd hit on something. "We're not going to compete over you. It's not fair to you, and ... and neither of us want to lose you."

"So how's this going to work then?" She felt the TARDIS dematerialize.

He stood and offered her his hand. "Let's talk about that after we get this bit of business taken care of."

Rose followed him to the console room, and after they landed, she exited the TARDIS between the two Doctors. "Ariel!" the second Doctor pronounced. "Not the best planet to visit if you fear running afoul of the law, but excellent hospitals that are _not_ run by cats." Both Doctors shuddered in unison, which made Rose giggle.

The city was crowded, but somehow sterile at the same time; Rose had rarely seen such a major metropolitan area that was so clean, so devoid of litter. Transports glided along spotless streets and through the air above their heads. Kiosks with some kind of computer interface stood at every corner. The people around them moved quickly, with barely a glance at each other. Rose realized she'd been to planets like this before; every sign pointed to an authoritarian government which gave people little freedom. All this cleanliness and order came at a price.

They arrived at a large hospital, tall and gleaming white. She and the Doctors breezed in like they owned the place, and the Doctor in brown flashed his psychic paper at the nurse at the front desk. "Department of Health, we're here to inspect some of your medical equipment. Specifically the resuscitation chambers, paramagnetic imagers, and the opticocerebral scanners."

The woman inspected his psychic paper long enough to make Rose very nervous, but in the end she just nodded. "Sorry, we can't be too careful these days. Had a major theft of some medicines a few weeks back. I'm sure you read about it." The Doctor made a noncommittal noise in response. The nurse tapped on a keyboard, shaking her head. "More inspectors every year," she muttered. "I don't see you on the schedule, I suppose this is a surprise inspection?"

"Indeed. Surprise inspectors, that's us."

She sighed. "Wait just a moment while I get you key cards for the areas you require." The tapping continued. After a few minutes, a machine spat out three cards, which she distributed among them. "Twins with the same job?" she asked.

The Doctor in brown flashed a charming smile at her. "We're very close." Rose noticed the part-human Doctor suppress a laugh, his cheeks going pink. They proceeded past the front desk into the main part of the hospital. "The thing with massive bureaucracies like this one is, often the security system itself becomes so unwieldy that security becomes weaker rather than stronger," the first Doctor murmured as they approached the lift. The Doctor in blue consulted a directory, then led the way onto the lift and punched the button for the ninth floor.

The lab with the scanner the Doctor wanted was empty, and he soniced the door locked behind them. "Rose, just get into that chair there," the second Doctor said, indicating what looked to Rose like an aerodynamic dentist's chair. "This is easy and painless, all you have to do is sit still." She followed their directions, allowing them to lower some kind of dome over her head. She could hear them conferring, perhaps arguing, in hushed voices, but couldn't make out what they were saying. 

After about ten minutes the dome went back up, and the first thing she saw were their faces, wearing identical wide grins. "What is it?" she asked nervously.

"Nothing!" said her first Doctor. "You're right as rain!"

Rose got up out of the chair. "Okay, is it your turn now?" she asked of the other man.

"Yep!" He hopped into the chair she had vacated, long legs stretching out in front of him. She watched as the Doctor in brown operated the equipment, his slender hands flying over the keyboard. In less time than it had taken with her, he finished, raising the dome over his duplicate's head. "All done?"

"Done," her first Doctor confirmed. 

It was at that moment that an obscured door they hadn't noticed on the opposite end of the room flew open, admitting three security guards. "The imposters have been located, over," one of them said into a comm.

"And not a moment too soon," the Doctor added, popping a data chip out of the computer and pocketing it. "Run!" He soniced open the door they'd come through and they dashed for a stairwell. A long descent amidst the wail of alarms and the element of surprise at a loading dock saw them clear of the hospital. They ran flat out for the TARDIS, making it aboard before a more general alarm was raised. 

After an abbreviated celebration at their success, Rose excused herself to the loo while the Doctors dematerialized the TARDIS. She used the toilet and freshened up, and then emerged into her bedroom to find both men standing there, waiting for her. She frowned at them. "What?"

Her first Doctor approached her. "I know that we have a lot of things to work through," he said, his voice thick with emotion, "but I want you to know that I love you ... so much."

"I love you too," she responded, glancing from him to the other Doctor, who was just watching them, then back again. The Doctor in brown cupped her face in his hands and leaned over to kiss her. It was hesitant and very gentle, and she responded to it, her own hands coming up to clutch the arms of his jacket. After a long moment, he broke the kiss and stepped away from her, watching her with dark eyes. 

The other Doctor walked over to take his place. "I'm not sure if I've been in this world for centuries or for a little over a week, but I _am_ sure of how completely I love you, Rose. I hope you believe that."

"I do," she gasped, her heart pounding. She couldn't believe they were each allowing the other to say these words to her. Then her second Doctor pulled her into a kiss and she gasped again as his warmer lips met hers. Another long moment, and then he pulled back, looking deep into her eyes. 

She felt the air behind her shift as her first Doctor moved to stand just behind her. He brushed the hair away from the back of her neck, and then she felt his breath against her skin. "You wanted to know how this was going to work," he whispered. "If it's all right with you, we thought that it might work something like this." His mouth descended on her neck, and she shivered at the wet kisses he began to plant there, even as the other Doctor leaned in to kiss her again.


	15. Chapter 15

Rose's mouth opened against his, and the part-human Doctor thought he might lose control of himself just from kissing her. When he let his hands slide down her sides to her waist, they met those of his duplicate, who was gripping her hips as he stood behind her and planting open-mouthed kisses on her neck and the part of her shoulder that he could access. Rose moaned, arching against the Doctor and holding him tighter. Her tongue stroked his in a kiss so deep it felt like he was being devoured. Or perhaps he was the one doing the devouring.

He felt the other Doctor's hands tighten and then Rose's hips pulled back against him, as he undoubtedly was pressing his erection against her backside. She broke the kiss, gasping for air, her eyes shut and her face a mask of pleasure.

"Is this okay?" the other Doctor asked against the shell of her ear. 

"Are you kidding?" she said breathlessly, causing his duplicate to chuckle low in his throat. 

"Just checking." Together, they undressed her slowly. He lifted her shirt over her head while the other Doctor unbuttoned and unzipped her trousers, slipping a hand inside and making her cry out. 

When they had her bare, the Doctor reached out and touched one of her breasts with a trembling hand. Rose's eyes fell shut again and she let her head loll back onto the Doctor behind her. "This feels _way_ too good," she moaned.

"Oh, this is nothing," the other Doctor purred. "Let's take this over to the bed."

The Doctor stood, transfixed, as Rose stretched out on the bed and the other Doctor hastily shed his clothes. As he started to crawl over her, the other man turned to him. "What are you waiting for?"

Shaking himself, the Doctor undressed while his duplicate lay on top of Rose and kissed her. Gradually, he worked his way down her body, swirling his tongue around her nipples and licking his way to her stomach. Rose's eyes were closed and she was breathing fast, moaning softly, her hands combing through his double's hair. The Doctor approached the bed tentatively and lay down beside her, his head propped up on an elbow. Rose was at least peripherally aware of his presence, because she reached out with one hand and touched his chest, her hand settling over his single heart. The Doctor put a hand on her cheek and turned her head toward him so that he could kiss her again. Their lips slid slowly over each other, unhurried; he felt like he could go on kissing her like this for the rest of his life and be perfectly happy. When she suddenly gasped into his mouth, he glanced down and saw the other Doctor's head between her legs, moving slightly, his hands splayed over her inner thighs to spread them. Watching him, the Doctor could almost imagine that he was the one tasting her, and he felt his erection twitch where it was pressed against her hip.

Rose groaned long and low, and he looked back at her face, watching the ecstasy play over her features. Once, a few years back, he had watched while Jack pleasured her this way, but this was even more fascinating. It was like he could be in two places at once. He leaned over and kissed her left breast, running his tongue along the underside of it before looking up at her again. "Do you like this?" he asked quietly. In answer, she plunged her hands into his hair and brought his mouth to hers for another deep kiss. She was still vocalizing her pleasure in the back of her throat, her hips beginning to move in rhythm with the other Doctor's activities. When she finally let their mouths separate, she began to utter a series a high-pitched cries. He recognized immediately what that meant. "Are you going to come?" The Doctor looked again at his duplicate, whose hand was moving as he thrust his fingers into her over and over.

"Yes," Rose moaned, "oh, god, so ... close ..." She clutched desperately at his shoulders and he could see the moment it hit her, the moment her face contorted with her climax. He felt the scrape of her fingernails and heard her scream. He shuddered, so close to coming himself even with so little direct stimulation. The Doctor buried his face in her shoulder, biting her skin gently. Her breathing gradually slowed, her fingers releasing from his shoulders. The other Doctor moved up Rose's body and stretched out on the other side of her, smiling with satisfaction. He looked up and met his duplicate's eyes. With a knowing smirk, the other Doctor held his fingers, still wet from Rose's body, up against the Doctor's mouth. He parted his lips and the other man slid his fingers inside, letting him taste Rose. The Doctor sucked, his eyes falling closed and another shudder of pleasure passing through him. He thrust against Rose's hip, helpless against the needs of his body, lost entirely to lust.

The other Doctor drew his fingers back. "I think," he murmured, "that my counterpart here is a bit overwhelmed with the response of his human body. We should probably do something to relieve his suffering, don't you think, Rose?"

She hummed with contentment, looking over and stroking the Doctor's cheek. "Would you like to be inside me?" she asked, and just the thought of it made him cry out softly, unable to form words.

"Oh. Actually, you might not want to do that," the other man said, causing the Doctor's eyes to fly open. What was he on about? How could he think to deny him this? Rose was also frowning at his double. "Not that I've done any tests to confirm it - wellll, in a manner of speaking I have, but never mind that. Obviously a thorough study of his DNA would be required before we really know for sure, but the basic components _are_ definitely human. Which is to say, he might be biologically compatible enough with you that he could get you pregnant."

Rose's eyes widened with understanding. "And I assume there aren't any condoms on this ship," she said, smirking.

"Not unless Jack left any behind, and that would have been years ago, so I don't think they'd be any good," the other man remarked.

"Oh well, no matter. There's more than one way to do this," Rose said with a predatory grin. She got up on hands and knees, pushing the Doctor over onto his back as she swung one leg over him. She kissed him, holding herself above his body so that barely any part of her was touching him. His hips lifted off the bed against his will, desperate for some contact, and he felt Rose smile against his mouth. She began crawling down his body, kissing her way from his neck to his chest. His throaty moan made her giggle. "This is kind of nice, actually. It's not so easy to get _him_ incoherent with pleasure," she said, nodding toward the other Doctor. "Takes real work on my part." Her mouth continued its progress down to his abdomen, and he flinched when his cock trailed between her breasts. Mercifully, she didn't spend long teasing him, and the next thing he felt was her tongue flicking out to touch the head of his cock. He thrust upwards again, his breath coming shallow and fast.

He sensed his duplicate shift over closer to him, then felt the other Doctor's lips against his ear. "You can't wait to come in her mouth, can you?" he murmured, as Rose began licking him, swirling her tongue around him in a way that was overwhelmingly pleasurable. "Can't wait to feel her suck you dry." He could smell Rose on the other Doctor's mouth, which was maddening in and of itself. 

She took him entirely into her mouth then, sucking with steady pressure. He let one hand come to rest on the back of her head, his hips moving erratically, his other hand fisting in the sheets. Rose circled the base of his cock with her fingers to keep him from choking her and kept up her relentless rhythm. He desperately wanted to last longer, but it was impossible. He came with a shout, tensing, his eyes flying open, bulging in the sockets. Rose's mouth was still on him, swallowing, gradually moving slower as he coasted down from his orgasm. All of his muscles relaxed and he collapsed bonelessly onto the bed. 

Rose released him after a few more seconds. He opened his eyes and saw her face swimming in front of him. "That was lovely," she said, leaning over and kissing his forehead.

"It was," the other Doctor said. 

"Last but not least," Rose said to him, smirking. She crawled over into his arms, straddling him, and with a minimum of adjustments, had the other Doctor's cock fully sheathed inside her. The Doctor rolled over to watch them, his eyes drooping lazily.

He didn't think he'd ever realized how perfect the two of them looked together when they were making love. Rose and the other Doctor moved in concert, his hips rising to meet her in the moment that she bore down, over and over and over. Their bodies undulated together, a union of love and pleasure and deep knowledge of each other. Rose leaned over and the other man stretched up to cover first one breast, then the other, with kisses. He shifted his hands to the small of her back, encouraging her movements. "I love watching you pleasure yourself on my cock," the other Doctor whispered, "and seeing your breasts moving like that." He gasped. "I don't want it to ever stop when it feels this good."

Rose shook her head, beyond speech herself. She slid her own hand down and touched her clit, throwing her head back so that her hair hung most of the way down her back. The Doctor lying beside them watched her, enraptured.

Crying out, Rose came for a second time, and the other Doctor clenched his jaw and groaned loudly immediately afterwards. As their motion slowed to a stop, Rose collapsed against the other man's chest. Both of them were panting. Turning her head, Rose looked over at the Doctor and smiled a sleepy, blissful smile at him. He reached out and stroked her hair.

Eventually, she lifted off of his duplicate, letting him slip from her body, and collapsed on her back between the two men. They both curled into her, and Rose sighed contentedly. "That was brilliant. Thank you."

"No, thank _you_ ," the other man murmured, kissing her shoulder. The Doctor closed his eyes, nuzzling Rose's ear and inhaling her scent. 

 

***

 

As Rose started to emerge from a deep sleep, she could just make out the murmur of male voices. She couldn't understand what they were saying, and at first she thought it was just because she was still mostly asleep. As she gradually became more aware of her surroundings, it became clear that the reason she couldn't understand them was that they weren't speaking English. Listening for a moment, she was able to recognize the musical quality of Gallifreyan, if not any of the meaning. She'd only heard the Doctor speak it a handful of times, usually when he thought he was alone and was talking to himself. Fully awake now, Rose kept her eyes closed, letting the beautiful words wash over her. The fact that both voices were the same, and that it was the voice she loved most in the world, made the experience that much more pleasurable.

Eventually, she felt the press of lips to her forehead. "We know you're awake, darling," one of the Doctors said in English.

Opening her eyes, Rose smiled. "I was just enjoying listening to you talk." Looking back and forth between the two of them, she saw that they were mirror images of each other, both with heads propped up on elbows, with the bedclothes carelessly pulled up to their hips. Even the trail of hair leading from their navels to the darker hair below was identical. Rose reached out and rested a hand on one man's chest, feeling the rhythm of his two hearts and confirming which Doctor was which. She thought about what they had done the night before, and felt a flush rise to her cheeks and a surge between her legs. "I have to ask," she said, sitting up against the pillows slightly and letting the sheet fall away from her breasts, "isn't it weird being in bed with your ... twin?"

The Time Lord shrugged. "Not that weird. It's not like we're brothers, we're just ... the same man. Mostly," he added.

"It was nice," her second Doctor said quietly, "watching you make love to him. It was like getting to watch _myself_ with you." The other Doctor nodded in agreement.

"Okay," Rose said. Another way in which the Doctor was alien, she supposed. She wasn't sure if the tables were turned that she'd just be able to welcome another Rose into their bed, much as the Doctor would certainly enjoy that. "I'm just afraid I'm not going to be able to keep up with the two of you. I mean, those few times we were with Jack, it was more ... I don't know, equilateral? Like, I did things with Jack, and I did things with you, but then also you did things with Jack, yeah? I mean, I'm assuming the two of you wouldn't ... you know."

The Doctor on her left smirked. "Don't be so sure."

Rose looked from one to the other. "Are you _serious_?"

The Doctor on her right flushed. "The night that you two fought, and you fell asleep in my room ... we, um ..."

"You'd left both of us in a bit of a state, Rose, both physically and emotionally," her first Doctor said, scratching the back of his neck. "I think we were in need of a tension-reliever."

Rose stared at him, her mouth hanging open. She couldn't decide whether to be shocked, or ... really turned on. She blurted out the first thing that came to mind, which was, "Can I see?"

"What?" her second Doctor squeaked. 

"Can I see you ... together?"

"Next time," the first Doctor breezed, jumping out of bed and starting to get dressed. "Right now, I'm starved!"

 

***

 

The Doctor watched Rose hop up on the infirmary table while he prepared the injection. His part-human counterpart was dematerializing the TARDIS, taking them away from 27th century Earth where they'd made a quick stop at a chemist, and the Doctor was sensible enough to wait until the ride evened out before doing anything involving needles.

"So that will make it so I can't get pregnant?" Rose asked, indicating the syringe.

"Yep."

"For how long?"

He looked up at her. "You should get another injection in a year."

"Blimey, that's a long time. I think from my time it was like, three months or something?"

"Well, this is from your future. Fewer side effects, too." He swabbed her upper arm, then met her eyes. "Are you sure about this?"

Rose frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, are you sure this is what you want?"

"We've talked about this before. A baby's not compatible with the life that we have."

The Doctor paced across the room and leaned on the counter. "We talked about it years ago. Things are different now. For one thing, with you and me, it would have been in-vitro fertilization and complicated genetic manipulation of the embryo. With you and him ... it could just happen naturally."

"Doesn't change the fact that our lives are dangerous. How could we bring a baby into that?"

He shrugged. "There's nothing requiring you - or the other Doctor, for that matter - to go outside the doors of the TARDIS and risk your life. Maybe you want a different life now." He approached her and took her hands in his. "And before you ask, this isn't because I'm trying to get rid of you. It's because I love you, and more than anything, I want you to be happy."

Rose leaned over and kissed him. "Thank you," she said, touching his cheek briefly. "But I'm sure. Give me the shot."

Swabbing her arm again, he inserted the small needle under her skin and depressed the plunger. "Done and done," he said, putting a plaster over the site.

Rose jumped down from the table. "If ... if I want to revisit this topic in a year?" she asked.

"Then we'll revisit it." The Doctor smiled at her, but it was forced. A lot could happen in that amount of time; he hoped that Rose would still be here in a year, her mind intact.

She ran into the other Doctor on her way out of the infirmary. "Quick and painless, I hope?" he asked with a grin, pointing at the plaster on Rose's arm.

"Yep. So you and I have a date later," she said cheekily, and smacked him on the bum as she left the room. The other man stared after her for a full fifteen seconds, his mouth hanging open.

The Doctor cleared his throat. "Was there something you wanted?"

"Oh! Yes. I was wondering if you'd gotten a chance to look more closely at the scan of Rose's brain."

"Yeah." He busied himself clearing up the syringe and other trash.

"Well? What did it say?"

The Doctor huffed and met his duplicate's eyes. "That there's no evidence that the Bad Wolf event will help her brain deal with a Time Lord consciousness. Her brain is human, pure and simple. Not augmented in any way that I can discern."

"Maybe you missed something."

"I didn't _miss_ anything." Reaching into his pocket, the Doctor pulled the data chip out and tossed it to the other Doctor. "Look at it yourself if you want; I doubt it will help, but it certainly can't hurt. In the meantime, I was thinking of going to the third moon of Shattrath, whaddaya think?"

The Doctor in blue nodded. "Just don't go during any of the major ice ages though, yeah?"

"Who do you think you're talking to?" the Doctor said indignantly. "Come on, help me pilot her." Spinning on his heel, he left the infirmary and headed for the console room with his duplicate in tow.


	16. Chapter 16

The Doctor picked at a bit of lint on the sleeve of his blue jacket and leaned back against the cold concrete wall, his eyes closed. He didn't open them until he heard the buzz of the sonic screwdriver finally stop. "Giving up, then?"

The Doctor in brown glared at him from where he was standing on the jail cell's only cot, trying to loosen the bars on the only window. Rose sat cross legged on the floor, examining her fingernails and doing her best to ignore both of them. He held out the screwdriver. "Why don't you come over here and see if you can do any better?"

The Doctor shook his head, his forearms resting casually on his knees. "I'm not going to waste the energy. This is ultra-high density concrete, you can't resonate it."

Rose finally looked up and spoke. "Wait, you can actually resonate concrete? I always thought that was just a euphemism."

"For _what_?" the other Doctor asked.

"Avoiding talking about things you didn't want to talk about. Or possibly masturbating," she added with a wink at the Doctor in blue, who let go of a sputtering, nervous laugh.

His duplicate hopped down from where he was standing on the cot, folding himself up to sit down on the floor with the other two. "And what do you think I'm avoiding?" he asked Rose.

She shrugged, looking down at her feet. "I don't know, the usual, I guess." She smiled as if she were joking, but the part-human Doctor didn't think she was.

They fell into silence for a few minutes. "With any luck, they'll come and get us for our hearing soon, then we can try to make a break for it," the Doctor said, just to fill the dead space.

"It's going to be at least two hours before that happens, and then we'd better hope we can make a break for it," his duplicate said. "The judicial system on the third moon of Shattrath is not famous for actual justice."

"Well if you knew that," Rose said with a tone of voice that said she'd been restraining herself from whinging for a while, "then why did you start a riot at that restaurant?"

"It wasn't me! It was _him_!" he screeched, pointing at the Doctor in blue. "He's the one who was chatting up the busboys about unfair labour practices."

"Yes, but _you're_ the one who sent that dessert cart flying directly at that manager," the Doctor said, more amused than angry.

"I think we can agree that you're both idiots and leave it at that," Rose said, back to examining her fingernails. Silence fell again.

"You were right," the other man said abruptly.

The Doctor frowned. "About what?"

"Not _you_. Rose." 

"What was I right about again?" she asked.

"I have … " He stood back up and began pacing the cell. Finally, he spoke in a rush, as if he wanted to finish his thought before he chickened out. "I have resented you, the fact that you hold the kind of place in my life that forced me to make the choice I did during the Ixari war."

The Doctor in blue looked up, surprised that the other Doctor was talking about this. He remembered feeling that way, knowing that it wasn't fair to Rose, that she didn't do anything wrong, and then feeling even worse. It had been a vicious cycle that his brain spun round and round, leaving him exhausted and sad a lot of the time. 

"Well, thank you for being honest about it," Rose said, her voice strained. 

"It's why I never allowed myself to get this close to a companion before. Because I knew eventually, something like that would happen. That I would have to choose between his or her life and the lives of thousands, millions, maybe even billions of others. But you … " He smiled sadly. "You became everything to me. My whole world, all with you as the focal point."

Rose looked exasperated. "I don't understand, it's like sometimes you say that like it's the best thing that ever happened to you, and sometimes you say it like your love for me is a horrible burden that you have to bear. I don't know whether I'm coming or going."

"It _is_ the best thing that ever happened to me … us," the Doctor in blue interjected. "Right, Doctor?"

"Yes," he said, his voice thick with emotion. "Yes."

"Except that you resent the fact that you love me too much," she said, her voice full of bitterness.

The Time Lord flinched. "You're the one who wanted me to talk about this, wanted me to admit that I felt that way. You even claimed that you understood that it wasn't logical, so don't throw it back in my face now. That's not fair."

"You're right," Rose said softly. "It's not. I'm sorry." She reached a hand out to him, and the other Doctor sat back down on the floor next to her, so that the three of them formed the points of a triangle. "It's just, it's been so hard these past months."

"I know."

"Look, there are all kinds of reasons why logically, I … _he_ should be able to put this behind him," the part-human Doctor said, leaning forward. He felt like for the first time, he was beginning to understand all the facets of this problem, and he was suddenly desperate to make Rose understand it too. "The fact that the destruction of the command carrier saved human lives, perhaps more than the ten thousand Ixari lives that were lost. The fact that UNIT probably would have figured out how to destroy it eventually without my help. The fact that losing you might have been the end of me, and on balance, the universe is better off with me in it." He smiled a little half-smile. "But the fact is, what I did, what he did, it's not what Time Lords do. Time Lords don't take actions like that. And that's hard to deal with; when he's the only Time Lord left, losing that identity with his race means … the Time Lords really are lost forever."

"Seems to me that Time Lords are whatever you say they are. You're the only one left to base the definition on," Rose said to the other Doctor.

"Ironic, given what a rubbish Time Lord the rest of them thought I was," the Doctor in blue said.

"I've always known that given the chance to do it over, I'd do the same thing, Rose," his double said, meeting Rose's eyes. "That was never the issue. But it hurt me deeply. Causing those deaths, however indirect … it ripped me apart."

"And I didn't give you time to mourn," Rose said, as if a lightbulb had suddenly gone off. "I felt like your grief was an affront to me, and ... and I just wanted you to stop being sad. I didn't give you time to mourn. Doctor," she looked back and forth between the two of them, making it clear that she was addressing both, "I'm so sorry."

"I'm sorry that my grief made you feel like less than you are, Rose," the other Doctor said. "My resentment, it was unfair."

"Because you really are the best thing that ever happened to me," the Doctor in blue added.

"To us," said the other Doctor.

Rose leaned over and hugged him awkwardly, her eyes shut tight. After a long time, they parted and Rose pulled the part-human Doctor into a hug. "Thank you," she whispered in his ear. 

After a while, the Doctor pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket and the three of them played until they were finally let out of their cell. Making their escape was tricky, and had there not been three of them, likely impossible. When they finally made it back to the TARDIS and were safely in the Vortex, Rose estimated that she'd been awake for more than 36 hours and went straight to bed with little more than a wave in their general direction and a huge, face-cracking yawn. The part-human Doctor, on the other hand, was more hungry than tired, and went off in search of biscuits in the spots where Rose typically hid them.

He went back to Martha's old room to shower and change into pyjamas, but then was at a loss for what to do. Should he go to sleep in this room, as he had before, or had their one threeway sexual encounter given him the right to sleep in Rose's bed? Squaring his shoulders, he decided he didn't care - it was his bedroom as much as it was Rose's and the other Doctor's.

When he let himself into the darkened room, Rose was alone and sleeping soundly. The Doctor crawled cautiously under the covers, and she didn't even register his presence. Wrapping an arm around her waist, he settled into the warm bed and was promptly asleep himself.

 

***

 

The first thing he became aware of was a hand on his bare chest, underneath the loose T-shirt he was wearing. Then it was lips, warm and moist, moving along his jawline. The scent of Rose flooded his awareness, and he brought a hand up to her back, hugging her close. The Doctor felt her smile against his neck.

"Hello," Rose murmured, still moving her mouth languidly over his skin. 

"Hello." He realized that he was already fully erect, even though he still wasn't completely awake. Then he had a disturbing thought and flinched, his eyes flying open. "You know that I'm the, um ... I'm not the ..."

"I know which Doctor you are," she said, pushing up so that she was looking straight down into his eyes. "You aren't that difficult to tell apart."

"We aren't?"

"You're warmer than he is, for one thing." With a wicked grin, Rose reached down and cupped him through his pyjamas, making him hiss. "Especially here."

Threading his fingers into her hair, the Doctor pulled Rose down for a frantic, deep kiss. After a couple of hours of sleep, he hoped his breath wasn't too bad. Rose didn't seem to care, returning his kiss with equal fervour. "Want you," he gasped into her mouth as their kiss ended.

" _Yes_." Rising up on her knees, Rose took off her vest top and then awkwardly divested herself of her knickers. She immediately went to work on his clothes, first pulling his pyjama bottoms and pants down and off his legs, then getting him up into a sitting position and lifting his T-shirt over his head. Pressing him back to the mattress, one of her legs slid between his and her chest pressed against him. 

"Oh, _wow,_ " the Doctor said, running his hands down her back and cupping her bum. "This feels incredible."

Rose smiled at him, but with a questioning look in her eyes. "Is it different from before, when you were ..."

He nodded. "I find that I am driven to mate with you with single-minded intensity. Never felt quite that way before."

The wicked grin came back, and Rose rolled her hips against him. "Now you know how I've been feeling about you for the last twelve years."

He groaned. "The downside is that I have absolutely no control over my body. I'm like a ... a virginal teenager."

"In a way, you _are_ a virginal teenager." She stroked his chest, then planted a kiss on his lips. "Don't worry about it. This is going to be fun, regardless." Leaning to one side, she pulled his earlobe into her mouth and released it with a pop. "And I know you know _exactly_ how to please me, virginal or no."

With a growl, he grabbed her and rolled so that she was underneath him. Long, deep, breathless kisses followed as they both let their hands roam over the angles and planes and curves of each others' bodies. Rose brought her knees up and spread her legs, and the Doctor took the hint, sliding his hand up her thigh and brushing his fingers over her centre lightly. Rose moaned and bucked against his hand.

She was right, of course. His might be a new body, but hers he knew like he knew the TARDIS console. First with just his index finger, he traced a path from her clitoris into her wet folds, slowly sinking it all the way inside her. Slowly, so slowly, he drew it back out and followed the same path up to her clit again. He repeated this motion several times, maintaining a torturously deliberate pace, his mouth exploring her neck and shoulders and breasts. When she seemed to grow impatient, he replaced one finger with two, moving faster, pressing deeper inside her. Rose moaned and writhed beneath him, her fingers clutching almost painfully in his hair. He was determined to make her come, didn't want her pleasure to be dependent on his being able to hold out once he was inside her. Rose seemed to understand; it wasn't unusual for her to take charge at this point in the proceedings, pulling him on top of her with her hands clutching his arse and demanding that he fuck her, or pushing him onto his back and sinking onto his cock. She did none of those things, content for him to bring her off with his hand.

"You feel so good," he murmured in her ear. "Want to watch you come, Rose. Want to feel it." He knew she liked it when he talked, and he let his voice drop into a register calculated to please her. Her hips moved more urgently, her teeth clenching as she got closer to release. "Ahh, I love the way your hips move. Can't wait to feel that while I'm inside you. Want you so much. I love you so much."

He felt her muscles spasm a split second before she cried out, bucking against his hand a few more times before relaxing, letting her knees fall wide. As her breathing slowed, he gently removed his hand and kissed her.

"Mmm," Rose murmured, running a hand down to his hip and around to circle his straining erection. "Now?"

His throat dry, he could only answer by moving on top of her, and letting her guide him as he thrust all the way inside her in one stroke. He gasped at the intensity of the pleasure sparking through every nerve ending. His need for her, his need to spill himself inside her, was powerful, undeniable. Bracing himself on his hands, he drove into her hard, unable to stop himself from crying out. Rose clutched at his back, wrapping her legs around him and moaning encouragement. He was lost, moving erratically, his orgasm so close he could taste it. When it came, it felt so explosive that he thought for a moment he might lose consciousness. It was only as he collapsed, a dead weight on top of her, his cries ringing in his ears, that he realized how loud he had been.

Rose let him lie on top of her for a long time, combing her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck as his cock softened inside her. Finally she spoke: "I love you too." The Doctor rolled away with a long, sated sigh, pulling her close against his chest and kissing her hair. "And now you're a virgin no longer," she said, smiling up at him.

He pondered the fact that actually, he wasn't a virgin anyway, thanks to his encounter with the other Doctor. That was still a bit of a puzzle for him, actually. Yes, part of the reason it had happened was as the Time Lord had said to Rose, that both of them were keyed up and horny, and perhaps it was also just a biochemical effect because he was created out of Rose. The more he thought about it, though, the more he thought there was more to it; he was genuinely attracted to the other man, which was, he realized, a bit weird. Maybe it was just narcissism on both of their parts, but he wondered if it wasn't that they each had something that the other lacked. The other Doctor was still a Time Lord, a powerful creature with superior physiology who was almost eternal. While _he_ had all the intelligence of the Time Lord, but the instincts, the desires of a human. Musing on his strange new life, the Doctor fell asleep.

 

***

 

The Time Lord slowly opened the door to his bedroom and walked in. He took note of the deep and even breathing of the two sleeping people in the bed and of the smell of sex that permeated the room. He tried to quash the feeling of jealousy that burned in his chest - he'd known this would happen, he'd even suspected that it might happen tonight. As he approached the bed, his double's eyes opened and they shared a long look. Working to appear unconcerned, the Doctor efficiently stripped naked. Rose had fallen asleep on her usual side of the bed, leaving the other Doctor in the middle. The Doctor got under the covers next to his duplicate, settling on his back and staring up at the ceiling. The part-human Doctor rolled over to look at him.

"How was it?" he asked the other Doctor bluntly. The sooner he broached the subject, he hoped the sooner he could get used to the idea.

"How was what?"

"Intercourse as a human," he said.

His duplicate paused, then took a deep breath. "Brilliant. There's a drive to it, an intensity, that I never felt when I was … you."

"Well, you are much further down the evolutionary ladder now," he said with a smirk. "Much closer to chimpanzees."

"Jealous?" his double asked.

The Doctor rolled onto his side to face him. "A bit."

The other Doctor smiled sadly. "Me too. I miss being you." Glancing over at Rose, the part-human Doctor said, "Here, why don't we switch places. She can wake up in your arms."

The Doctor couldn't help but be touched by the offer. For the first time, he felt genuinely optimistic about the relationship among the three of them, that perhaps it really would work. "All right."

The other Doctor sat up and started to climb over him. As their bodies shifted against one another, they shared a heated look, and the part-human Doctor leaned down to capture his mouth. He tensed for a moment, but then allowed himself to melt into the kiss. After a couple of blissful moments of lips and tongues and friction as their hips thrust against each other, they were interrupted by a gasp from the other side of the bed. They turned their heads to see Rose with her eyes open and filled with desire.

"Please don't stop," she said breathlessly.

The Doctor smiled. "As my lady wishes," he said in a throaty voice, rolling them so that they were closer to Rose and he was the one on top, his mouth crashing together with the other Doctor's once more.


	17. Chapter 17

Donna pulled open the door of the coffee shop, and after peering through the crowd, saw that Rose had staked out two of the comfy, overstuffed chairs in the corner. With an excited wave, Donna gestured toward the counter to indicate that she was going to get a coffee, and Rose nodded her understanding. A few minutes later Donna approached the other woman and the two of them shared a sisterly hug.

"Where's the Doctor…s?" she asked, belatedly converting the word into the plural.

Rose laughed. "Would you believe, they went to see a film? They'll probably talk to each other through the whole thing, drive everyone around them spare. They should be here after not too much longer."

"I don't know how you get a word in edgewise with two of them," Donna commented.

"Sometimes I don't," Rose said, smiling fondly. 

Donna peered at her, and there was no mistaking the merriment in her eyes. "How long has it been for you, since the Dalek Crucible?"

"Almost two months."

"You seem really happy."

"Oh, Donna. I'm _so_ happy. Things are … things are brilliant."

"But … how? The last time I saw you, the two of you were miserable, bogged down with all those problems dragging on your marriage. And I'll be honest, I thought the other Doctor, I mean, just the fact that he existed, regardless of what you decided to do about him, was going to make things worse."

Rose shook her head. "I'll admit, I didn't have the faintest idea how it was going to work at first. Suddenly, I had two husbands! Turns out, it was the best thing that ever happened to us," she said with a giggle.

"So, what, they just share you?"

"It's more complicated than that," Rose said mysteriously. "But the important thing is, we've worked through a lot of our problems. We've come to terms with what happened during the war, I think. The Doctor - the Time Lord one, I mean – has opened up about his feelings, and I realized some mistakes that I made. Things are so much better, Donna."

"I'm glad." Donna took a sip of her coffee. "What about the way you were worried about getting older?"

Rose grimaced. "I guess the very existence of my second Doctor forced me to confront that. Because if it was really something that I couldn't get past, if it was really going to be a deal-breaker, then the obvious answer was that I should stay with the human, and leave the Time Lord behind. And if my first Doctor wasn't prepared to watch me grow old, he could have insisted on that - it would have been an out for him, if he wanted to take it. Basically, I realized what I should have known all along: I'm never gonna leave him, not as long as I'm alive. And, just as important, I know now that he doesn't secretly wish I would."

"I'm so relieved to hear that," Donna said, glancing at the people around them and then leaning forward. "But … okay, I'm just going to ask this. How does it work? I mean, do you alternate nights with them?"

Rose giggled. "You know, when we were younger, I had to get you very drunk before you'd ask me questions like that."

"Well, I guess I have a stronger constitution now," Donna said dryly.

"In answer to your question, no, I don't alternate nights with them. It's the three of us, together." She took a long drink from her own cup. "That's the way it works."

Donna's eyes had gotten very wide. "So, you're saying … you're saying that you sleep with both of them at the same time." She leaned closer and lowered her voice. "And when I say sleep with –"

"I have sex with them at the same time, yes," Rose said with no trace of shame.

"Wow. I'm sure that's brilliant for _you_ , although it must be exhausting at times," Donna said with a nervous laugh. "And I'm surprised they don't pull you apart in a tug of war."

"Nah, mostly it's just brilliant, and it's not like that. It's very … equilateral."

"Whaddaya mean, 'equilateral'?"

"Well, I should preface this by saying, this wasn't our first threeway experience, the Doctor and me."

" _Really?_ " Donna loved a bit of juicy gossip as much as anyone, but this went beyond juicy. "You don't mean you had an open marriage?"

"No no no no, it wasn't like that. The person we were with knew that we're in a committed relationship. I mean, the Doctor and I care for him deeply, but it was sexual experimentation with a friend, and it only happened, like, maybe as many as six times over the course of almost as many years."

"Who are we talking about here?" Donna asked.

"I'm sure you can guess," Rose said with a smirk. "Jack."

"Well, I will say that's the first person who popped into my mind."

"Also, you need to understand, for the Doctor, sexual orientation is sort of … fluid. He's mostly straight, he's had a couple of incarnations that were mostly gay. But he's bisexual enough to enjoy an occasional … encounter, shall we say, with another man."

A million images crashed into Donna's mind simultaneously. Then, connecting the logical dots, she gasped. "Are you saying that the two Doctors …with _each other_?"

"Oh yeah." Rose's cheeks flushed an endearing shade of pink.

"Well, that's ... disturbingly kinky." Donna commented, shaking her head. "But maybe not so surprising - he's certainly arrogant enough the fall in love with himself, isn't he?" She shuddered with distaste.

"Sorry you asked?"

"A bit, yeah." She looked up at the ceiling, then back at Rose. "But if the three of you are happy, then I promise I won't judge."

"Speak of the devils," Rose said, waving happily at someone over Donna's shoulder. Donna turned to see the two Doctors, making their way through the crowd, chattering away at each other simultaneously. She turned back to Rose. "Which one is which?"

"They've stayed in the same suits they were in on that day on the Crucible: the Time Lord's in brown, the other one's in blue. Of course, I had to learn to tell them apart naked."

"Just ... don't tell me any more," Donna said with an emphatic hand gesture. "Sexy share time's over."

Rose laughed as she looked up at the Doctors. "How was the film?"

"Brilliant," the Doctor in brown said at the same time the other one said, "Daft." Then they busied themselves with enthusiastic greetings for Donna, each of them armed with hugs, exclamations of "Ha!" and wide grins. Donna could tell that they were both as happy as Rose was. With an indulgent smile, Donna listened to their banter and attempted to put any lurid images of them in bed together out of her mind. 

 

***

 

Donna was curled up at one end of the sofa, staring somewhat blearily into her wine glass. The part-human Doctor was sprawled on the other end, his scrawny legs stretched out in front of him, red trainers jiggling with nervous energy. Levering himself up, he reached for the wine bottle on the coffee table and poured the remainder of the wine into his glass. It was late, past midnight; Phil had long since gone to bed, while Rose and the other Doctor had headed back to the TARDIS. Donna was torn between wanting to go to sleep, and wanting to talk to this Doctor, the same man she knew and yet different, one-on-one.

He giggled suddenly. "I think I'm drunk. I'm not sure if I've ever been drunk before. I think I like it."

"Great," Donna said, rolling her eyes. "Well, just remember that it doesn't feel so good the next morning, yeah? Pace yourself."

"Did Rose tell you how things are with the three of us?" he asked, not acknowledging her warning.

"Yeah, she did, and you _really_ don't need to elaborate. Really." She shuddered to think what he might reveal in his inebriated state.

"I love them both." He swirled his wine in his glass. "Don't tell the Doctor I said that."

"Okay, I won't."

"Her life's in danger."

"I'm sorry, what?" Donna was having a hard time following his jumps in conversation.

"Rose. The metacrisis, there was an effect on her brain." He was over-enunciating every word. "You see Donna, a metacrisis goes two ways. It created me, but it also reflected back on her. She has a Time Lord consciousness lying dormant inside her head."

"What does that mean?" Donna asked in a hushed voice, suddenly feeling quite sober.

"You haven't any idea how much more goes on in my mind, and in _his_ mind, than in any normal human's. And it's okay for me; my brain came into being using his as a template. I can manage to hold all of it; all the knowledge, the millennium of experiences, the speed of the thoughts ... of course, they aren't moving that fast just now. That must be the alcohol."

"Doctor, focus."

"Yes, right." He sat up straighter. "But Rose has a human brain, completely human. And she's brilliant, but her mind can't handle a Time Lord consciousness. It would kill her."

"But ... but you said it's dormant."

"It is _now_." He was back to examining his wine glass. "Might not be forever."

"So what are you going to do?" Donna asked, moving over and putting her hand on his arm what she hoped was a supportive gesture.

The Doctor looked up and met her eyes. And he might be partly human, Donna thought, but in that moment she could see the centuries of grief of the Time Lord lurking in his eyes. After a beat, he shook himself and plastered on a toothy smile. "Two Doctors on the case, I'm sure we'll come up with something!" He set his glass down, stood up, and stretched. "I ... have kept you up way too late, Donna Noble. We should both go to bed before we turn into pumpkins, don't you think?"

"But, Doctor -"

"Never mind all that stuff I was rattling on about, Donna, I've had entirely too much to drink. I'm sure it will all work out in the end." He pulled her into a tight hug. 

The Doctor in either incarnation was too good at shutting down a topic of conversation. Donna sighed and gave up, patting him on the back. "Don't be a stranger, all right?"

He pulled out of the embrace and looked at her. "You've been one of my best friends Donna, I hope you know that. Please remember that ... whatever happens, I was a better man for having known you." And then with a smile and a wave, he walked out the door. Donna followed him out, watching him walk down the street until he disappeared from view.

 

***

 

Rose sighed and pressed herself back into the Doctor, who lay spooned around her in their bed. He shifted, adjusted the angle, groaned softly as he was buried that last inch inside her. Their legs tangled together and the Doctor wrapped an arm tight around her, pressing a wet kiss to the back of her neck. Rose could feel the fluttering, complicated rhythm of his double heartbeats against her spine. The sex was leisurely and unhurried, and it was one of those moments when Rose really felt as if she could spend hours this way, making love slowly, the pleasure of it banked down like a smouldering fire. She brought a hand up and threaded her fingers through the Doctor's, where his hand was lying against her belly. She wanted to delay the moment when he reached down and touched her between her legs, the moment when the pleasure would surge beyond her ability to control it and the end of this blissful moment would be within sight.

"This is so good," she whispered.

"It's perfect."

They hadn't settled into a pattern, the three of them, or at least if they had, it was too complicated for Rose to tease out. But things had settled into a comfortable state of being. She was still running from one adventure to the next, still hurtling through space and time in the magical machine that had become her home, but now she had two partners instead of one. One of them fell into darker moods, and one of them had a softer smile; both of them were brilliant, and both of them were hers. When she saw something amazing, sometimes it was the Time Lord's hand she grabbed as she bounced with excitement, and sometimes it was a warmer hand that clasped with hers. When she went to bed, it might be with the one for whom sex in his body was still a bit overwhelming, or it might be with the man who still sometimes found it difficult to relinquish control, or it might be both of them. And she knew too that occasionally when she wasn't with them, they sought each other out for pleasure and comfort.

"I love you," he said, and his pelvis stopped moving for a moment as he concentrated on kissing her shoulder, his hand letting go of hers to shift up and cup her breast.

A wedge of light fell across the bed as the door opened to admit the other Doctor. He watched them for a moment, then asked, his voice low and quiet, "Can I join you?"

Both of them answered _yes_ , and kept up their slow lovemaking while he undressed. Her second Doctor stood at the foot of the bed, aroused, considering, and then he slipped into bed behind her first Doctor, pressing against his back, one hand drifting over to touch Rose's thigh. The Doctor who was inside her moaned, and she craned around to see the part-human Doctor trailing his mouth over the other's shoulder and neck. He reached up and covered the hand which was on her breast with his own. Rose could feel the pressure of the second Doctor's pelvis grinding against the one in the middle, causing him to buck into her. She gasped and closed her eyes, sliding her hand down between her own legs, beginning to coax herself closer to orgasm.

"I want to fuck you," she heard whispered, and felt the nod of the man just behind her. She was aware of the other Doctor moving around, followed by a wet sound, and she could picture his hand moving over his cock. The Doctor inside her stopped moving, his breath quickening. Rose had one leg thrown over his and she moved it, allowing the first Doctor to position himself as he needed to.

"Bend a little," the second one murmured, and Rose got folded at the waist, the Doctor's cock slipping part of the way out of her. The three of them had never tried to have sex quite this way before, and Rose's heart hammered with excitement. The Time Lord's lips were just behind her ear, and she felt every gasp and sigh as he was penetrated. Again, the momentum of the second Doctor carried through to her, and with a satisfied moan Rose looked back at them, at the play of muscle over bone, at perfectly identical hipbones one behind the other, and felt a throb low in her belly at the sight.

Finally, she was able to straighten out a bit, and she reached back and grasped her first Doctor's haunch so that she could pull herself onto him again. One of the his legs moved between hers. She felt another leg come up and over her thigh, and was amused that she had to look down to confirm that it belonged to her second Doctor. His hand also gripped her hip. "Move with me, Rose," he said in a raspy voice, and he guided her into a rhythm where she pushed back against the Doctor at the same time that the other Doctor pushed in. Her first Doctor was cocooned between them, completely at their mercy.

"Oh," he cried. "Oh, fuck. You ... that's ... _fuck_."

"It's good?" the other Doctor asked, and Rose could hear the satisfied smirk in his voice.

"Was wrong before," he responded through gritted teeth, drawing breath more quickly with each thrust. " _This_ is perfect." One of his hands flew up and latched onto a bar on the headboard. 

"So hard to completely lose myself in sex when I was you," the second Doctor said. "But so very, _very_ good when I did."

"Yes," the other one gasped. "Want to ... want to ..."

"Just feel us," the second Doctor responded, and Rose groaned as the Time Lord's teeth scraped the skin of her shoulder. 

Rose pressed her lower hand against the mattress for more leverage, pushing back harder with her hips. It wasn't long before the first Doctor's moans rose in pitch, became more desperate. "Rose," he managed, "please ... I can't ... can you ...?"

She was very close, her fingers again working her clit, and the sound of the Time Lord so out-of-control hurtled her over the edge. As her orgasm overtook her, she heard the Doctor shout, felt him come, his trembling and repeated, incoherent cries betraying how very powerful this was for him. After several moments Rose stopped moving, enjoying the way the Doctor continued to clutch her as he panted, trying to regain his breath.

Eventually, Rose let the Doctor slide out of her and she rolled over. Her second Doctor was still moving inside him, his mouth open and slack with pleasure. She lay there and looked her fill, at the way the muscles of stomach and hip and thigh flexed as he moved, at the way his long, elegant fingers gripped the hipbone of his duplicate, at the way her first Doctor's breath still hitched with every thrust, his eyes closed. The second Doctor's other hand came up and closed over his duplicate's that was still gripping the headboard, and their fingers laced together. Finally, he opened his eyes and met hers, and his orgasm seemed to hit him suddenly, making him clench his jaw and throw his head back, exposing the impossibly long column of his neck. 

They relaxed together in a tangle of limbs and Rose stayed slightly apart, still studying the two of them. She smiled, then reached out and touched first one face, then the other. "I want it to be this way forever," she said softly.

Two sets of eyes opened and met hers. Without saying anything, they reached out and pulled her into an embrace.


	18. Chapter 18

Rose followed the sound of voices as she made her way through the cavernous wardrobe room. Suddenly one them rose in pitch, sounding very indignant. "I have _not._ "

"You can deny it all you like, but you have. You're heavier than me; it's that human metabolism. Turn 'round." There was a pause. "It's no problem, black is slimming." 

_"Oi!"_

She was getting closer to the source of the voices. "Oh, stop fondling your own bum."

"Jealous?" 

Rose came around a corner into the section of the wardrobe that held the men's formal wear. Both Doctors were standing in front of a full length mirror in dinner jackets, one of them tousling his hair while the other turned this way and that, studying his image intently. They were completely and utterly adorable, she thought. The part-human Doctor spotted her in the mirror and spun around. "Rose, have I put on weight?"

She shrugged. "Maybe a couple of pounds." His face fell. "Please, you could put on ten pounds and still be skinny as a rake. Don't fret about it; I promise, you wear it well."

Her first Doctor spoke up. "Wait a minute, are you saying I'm _too_ thin?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake," she muttered. "You're both impossibly gorgeous. Women look upon you and weep."

Her second Doctor was back to primping. "Just women?"

The other Doctor seemed to notice for the first time that she was in her dressing gown. "You aren't _dressed_ yet? What have you been _doing_ all this time?"

Rose glared at him. "What you meant to say was, 'Why Rose, your hair and makeup are lovely.'" She had her hair swept up in a complicated style, accented with tiny, jewelled butterfly pins. "I've put on my stockings and all; it'll take me two minutes to slip into my dress and shoes." Now they were both staring at her. "What?"

The second Doctor spoke up. "Did you say stockings?"

Rose smirked at them, untied her dressing gown and opened it wide like a flasher, showing off her lingerie. "See anything you like?" After taking a moment to revel in the lust in their eyes, she covered herself up again. "I'll meet you in the console room in five minutes," she called, heading for her original destination, the part of the wardrobe where she had sequestered all of her favourite dresses. As she walked away, she heard a brief snippet of their resumed conversation.

"That's quite a tent you've got pitched in your trousers, Doctor."

"Shut it, beanpole."

When Rose walked into the console room a bit later, she stood mesmerised for a moment, watching the two Doctors piloting the TARDIS. They moved fluidly around the console flipping switches and turning knobs, and Rose wondered how their actions could be so coordinated without their needing to speak. Her second Doctor had told her that he didn't have the telepathic abilities that he'd had as a Time Lord, so that wasn't the reason. Standing apart from them, with neither in their customary suit, Rose realized with a start that she didn't know which Doctor was which. There was something strangely erotic about the not-knowing, and she began to ponder whether there was a way to maintain that ignorance during sex. Perhaps in a hot bath, to mask their body temperatures, and if she avoided touching their chests ... her fantasy became so engrossing that she barely even noticed when they landed. As she followed the Doctors out of the TARDIS, she completely failed to keep the naughty smirk off her face.

 

***

 

It was eight years of their time since they had been here, the planet Elfizullium III in the 38th century. They'd always intended to return to the place where they'd spent their honeymoon, but never had until today, and the Doctor smiled at how shocked he would have been had he known then how things would turn out. Tonight they were in a ludicrously expensive restaurant, but as always the Doctor found ways to get around such trivial matters as money. Each course, of which there were many, was a small, perfect feast for the senses, enhanced by a taste of the best wine pairing available in the galaxy. The Time Lord, while he missed out on most of the sensations that humans got from drinking alcohol, at least was able to greatly appreciate the food and wine with his heightened sense of taste and smell. They sat in a dark corner of the room, their primary light a candle that flickered in the centre of the small table.

"Oh, I almost forgot!" Rose said suddenly, holding up her wine glass toward the other Doctor. "Happy quarter birthday!"

He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. "Happy what?"

She grinned. "It's been three months. You're three months old, in a way. So it's your quarter birthday."

"We're not going to have to celebrate every three months for the rest of his life, are we?" the Doctor whined.

"Oh, hush. And no, just this year." She gestured with her glass again, and he and the other Doctor obediently clinked theirs to hers.

Their waiter came and cleared their plates, replacing each of them with a fluted glass. Inside the glass was a crustacean, much like a prawn, speared on a vanilla bean. "When you eat the _kraftel_ ," the waiter explained, "tip your head back and pull it off the bean in one bite. This will allow the scent of the vanilla to be experienced along with the taste of the food."

Rose giggled and thanked him, reaching for her new glass of wine. "This is a far cry from chips, isn't it?"

"Oi, don't knock chips," the other Doctor said. "It's hard to beat good chips."

"I would never knock chips, you know that. Especially given their significance in our relationship," she said, grinning as she let her head fall back to properly enjoy the latest delicacy.

When the meal was finally over, they continued to sit in companionable silence, enjoying their last drinks. The Doctor was distracted briefly by the rather alarming laugh of a woman with purple skin sitting a few tables away; she was a telepath, and he could hear the laugh with his ears as well as inside his mind. With a shake of his head, he turned and noticed that Rose was staring at him with what she almost certainly thought was a meaningful glance.

"What?" he asked.

"Don't you think it's time for the ... you know," she murmured under her breath. The other Doctor was watching her and frowning with confusion.

"The what? Oh! Right!" He began feeling around in his pockets, finally finding the box he was looking for in his right breast pocket. He handed it over to Rose, who smiled sweetly at his duplicate.

"So the Doctor and I were talking the other day, and I pointed out that there's something that he and I have that you're lacking, and that it wasn't really fair. So ... do you remember last week when you and I spent the afternoon on the beach on that planet with the three suns, and he disappeared?"

The other man seemed to have no idea what she was getting at. "Of course I do."

"Well, he was taking the TARDIS to get this," she said, handing the box over to the other Doctor. Rose bounced a little bit in her seat, her cheeks flushed pink.

His duplicate turned the box over and over in his hands, and then tentatively opened it. He just stared at what was contained within for several seconds before looking up at them, his eyes glistening. "You didn't need to do this," he said, his voice thick with emotion.

The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck, feeling uncomfortable. "It wasn't any trouble. I mean, I suggested we just put mine on a time-share, but Rose said that was daft."

"It _was_ daft," she said without taking her eyes off the other man. "Is it okay? I mean … "

The other Doctor's smile was tremulous. " _Okay?_ It's brilliant." He looked back and forth between the two of them. "Thank you."

Rose was bouncing again. "So put it on."

The part-human Doctor pulled the silvery ring out of the box and turned it in the light, studying at the Gallifreyan writing. It was identical in every detail to the wedding ring that the Time Lord wore. 

"No, wait!" Rose piped up again. "I should put it on your finger, yeah? Like I did the other one, on New Earth." He handed it to her and held out his left hand. Rose paused, screwing up her face. "I wish I could remember what I said that day. I was too nervous to commit it to memory."

"I remember what you said," his double said, and the Doctor noticed that the hand he held out trembled just the slightest bit.

"You said," the Doctor interjected, suddenly feeling the import of the moment himself. "'You are the most amazing man in the universe. I was yours from the moment that you grabbed my hand and told me to run. And I'll be yours until the day I die. No matter what happens, no matter what trials we have in store, I'll always be yours.'" He watched his duplicate as he spoke, whose eyes were going from him to Rose to the ring.

Rose repeated the words for her second Doctor, slipping the ring on his finger. Then she leaned over and brushed her lips against his, and they stared at each other few a few beats. The other Doctor cleared his throat suddenly, looking self-conscious. He laughed. "And do I get any vows and a kiss from you?" he asked, cocking an eyebrow at the Time Lord.

"Yeah, I vow that if I regenerate within your lifetime, you can have the brown suit," he said, smirking.

Rose frowned at him. "That's not funny."

The Doctor lowered his eyes, chastened. "Sorry."

"At least you'd be able to tell us apart easily," the other Doctor added.

"I _like_ occasionally not being able to tell you apart easily," Rose said with a decidedly evil grin. "As a matter of fact, I had an idea that I'd like to try this week, if we got one of those rooms with the big bathtubs."

His duplicate's eyes met his and they shared a smile. "I think it's time we headed over to the hotel, don't you think?" the Time Lord asked. 

"Oh, absolutely," the other Doctor agreed in a husky voice.

They all got up from the table, Rose leading the way. As they left the restaurant, the Doctor suddenly felt something in the timeline shift and settle. In his mind, he sensed doors closing off, leaving the three of them committed to a path. Trouble was, he couldn't see where it led, or if it was bad or good. It wasn't odd, in and of itself, for him to perceive a shift in the timeline like this, but it still sent a shiver down his spine. On impulse, the Doctor grabbed the other man's hand and pulled him back, pressing a kiss against his warm lips. "There, you happy?" he asked, attempting to make light of his actions.

Rose spent the brief walk to their old hotel teasing both of them with every sexual weapon in her arsenal, the wine making her unabashedly flirtatious. By the time they let themselves into their suite, the Doctor's part-human counterpart appeared to have reached his limit of being toyed with. With a growl, he pressed himself against Rose's back, reaching around and touching her between her legs, making her gasp. The Doctor wandered to the other side of the room and flopped down on the bed, crossing his black trainer-clad feet at the ankle and putting his hands behind his head, watching them. 

The other Doctor whispered something against Rose's neck, interspersing it with kisses and gentle nips with his teeth. She nodded vigorously, then stepped away from him slightly and worked her knickers down her legs and off. With a predatory grin, the other Doctor pressed on her back, indicating that she should bend over the back of an armchair. She did, then looked up at the Time Lord and grinned. The other Doctor was fumbling with his trousers with one hand while he gathered Rose's dress at her waist with the other. He touched her and she moaned, biting her bottom lip and moving her hips against his hand. Once he'd freed his erection, his duplicate wasted no time in lining himself with her and sinking inside her with a single thrust. 

Rose was in a slightly precarious position, forced up onto her tiptoes so that their bodies would meet up properly, but it didn't stop her from meeting each of his thrusts. His duplicate was looking down, watching himself disappear into her, each time with a grunt through his clenched teeth. "Love ... being inside you, Rose ... " He looked like he was already getting close to climaxing.

"You're in quite a hurry," the Doctor on the bed commented. "We _do_ have all night. All week, really."

The other Doctor looked up at him. "Right, yeah. Sorry." He pulled out of Rose slowly, and the Doctor could tell that the loss almost pained him. 

Rose levered herself back up into a standing position and walked on wobbly legs over to the bed, where she crawled into the Doctor's arms. He cradled her between his legs, wrapping one arm around her and threading his fingers into her hair. The kiss they shared was slow and deep, and the taste of her mouth sent sparks of pleasure straight to his cock, which was already hard from watching her getting fucked by his duplicate. He keened in the back of his throat, suddenly wanting everything at once - he wanted to bury himself inside her, or perhaps in the other Doctor; he wanted to spread her legs and taste her, but he didn't want to stop kissing her. When she finally broke the kiss, both of them gasped for air.

"What do you want to do, love?" he asked Rose softly. Biting her lip, she untied his bowtie and unbuttoned the first two buttons of his crisp, white shirt.

The Doctor slid his hand down her bum and squeezed, then looked over at the other Doctor, who had sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes. He seemed to be trying to get himself back under control, and had pulled the holy book of the Church of the Tin Vagabond out of the bedside table drawer and put his glasses on to skim through it. "Enjoying your book?" the Doctor asked him.

His duplicate snapped the book closed and dropped it on the floor. "Not particularly, no." He shrugged his dinner jacket off and unknotted his own tie. 

"Make him come," Rose whispered in the Time Lord's ear, shifting off of his body. "I want to watch you."

"Stand up," he said to the other Doctor. His duplicate obeyed, and the Doctor moved off the bed to kneel in front of him. Reaching up with long arms, he unbuttoned the other man's shirt and parted it to get it out of the way. His trousers were still unfastened, and the Doctor pulled them down far enough to free the other Doctor's erection. Without hesitating, he took the other man's cock deep into his mouth. The musky flavour of his part-human duplicate combined with that of Rose, from when he had been inside her, made the Doctor groan with appreciation. He felt the other man's hands fist into his hair, felt his hips buck. The Doctor pulled back, letting his tongue run along the underside of the other man's penis, then flick against the tip, before he took him back into his throat again, sucking harder and bobbing his head. 

"Yes, yes, fuck ..." the other Doctor bit out, followed by a desperate groan. "Rose, pull your dress up, I wanna see ... wanna see you touching yourself."

The Doctor heard a soft, feminine moan from the bed and assumed that Rose was masturbating while she watched them, though from his vantage point he couldn't see her. The mental image of it flashed quite clearly in his mind, though, and he could still taste her on the other Doctor's cock, and all of it combined made him feel like he might come uselessly in his trousers if this continued much longer. These two people, two _humans_ , had come to mean more to him than anyone else in his long life - Rose, his beloved, his wife, his partner, whom he loved more today than he ever had in all their years together, and the other Doctor, a man who was so like him in so many ways, but better because of his humanity - kinder, more open, more free. If he was very lucky, the two of them would grow old together and the Doctor would watch over them, would love them and care for them until they died. And they would love him in return. For as many years as he could manage to eke out, the Doctor would be loved. It was the best he could hope for, but right now, it felt like an embarrassment of riches.

The other Doctor was close to orgasm, vocalizing his pleasure, his thigh muscles trembling under the Doctor's fingers. He thrust forward twice more and came, and the Doctor continued to suck, swallowing, savouring the faintly briny taste of him on the back of his tongue. When he released the other man's cock from his mouth, his double collapsed onto the bed, panting; his trousers halfway down his legs, his shirt unbuttoned, and his specs still perched on his face. The Doctor looked at Rose then; she was flushed with desire, her dress hiked up and her hand moving between her legs. He might have laughed later at how quickly he had his own trousers down and was on top of her, burying himself inside her. Rose wrapped her legs around him and brought her hands to either side of his face to kiss him deeply, tasting the other Doctor on his tongue. He could feel that the fingers of one hand were slick and wet from touching herself, and the Doctor turned his head and kissed her palm, inhaling her scent. 

They were both close, both beyond the ability to tease or prolong the experience, and they raced toward climax together. Every hard thrust brought him to greater and greater heights of ecstasy until he fell over the edge, and Rose along with him. 

As they all regained their breath, there was some laughter over the fact that none of them had managed to get their clothes all the way off; the Doctor was still almost entirely dressed, his trousers down around his trainer-clad feet. Once they had corrected this oversight, the three of them crawled into the bed, collapsing in a tangle of limbs under the covers. The Doctor's two hearts settled into a slow rhythm, and he snuggled against Rose's back, his fingers laced through his duplicate's where their hands rested on her hip.

 

***

 

When the Time Lord awoke after about half an hour of dozing, he was surprised to find himself in bed alone with Rose. With a brief kiss to the top of her sleeping head, he got up out of bed and pulled his trousers and shirt on, not bothering to button the latter. It didn't take long to track down the other Doctor; wrapped in one of the dressing gowns provided by the hotel, he was standing out on the balcony. The Doctor slipped through the door to join him. The hotel was nestled in the wall of an enormous canyon, and although it was too dark to see the waterfall on the other side, the sound of it blanketed everything with white noise. "Couldn't sleep?" he asked his duplicate.

The other Doctor turned and looked at him for a moment, then looked back out over the railing. "Seems not. You slept a long time, though."

"Hadn't slept any this week," the Doctor responded.

"You've been working on the Rose Problem while we sleep," the other man said flatly. It was how they'd come to refer to the danger that lurked in Rose's brain: the _Rose Problem_.

"Yeah."

"And have you found anything?" the other man asked.

"You know I haven't." The Doctor stepped up and stood beside him. "Is that why you're out here brooding?"

He just smiled thinly, reaching up to run fingers through his unkempt hair. "I think I might be getting used to being human. Seems almost normal now, this simple heartbeat. The desires, and the weaknesses, it's all ... it's who I am now."

The Doctor realized that the other man hadn't really answered the question, but he chose not to challenge him on the point. "It's not all of who you are. You're still a Time Lord up here," the Doctor said, tapping a finger against the other man's forehead.

His double just looked away. "I told you, I can't see timelines any more."

"Wellll, that's not all it's cracked up to be anyway, is it? I mean, just today, I ..." he paused. Maybe it was better not to mention it; no need to worry the other man needlessly.

"What?" The other Doctor looked into his eyes unflinchingly.

"Nothing. Probably nothing." His duplicate continued to stare at him, and the Doctor sighed heavily. "You remember what it felt like, when something in the timeline settled into place, when some event in the future became set. I felt that today. But there's no reason to believe that it's anything bad," he added quickly.

"Well, _that's_ not ominous foreshadowing or anything," the other man said sarcastically. They stood in silence for a while, looking out into the night, listening to the waterfall. "You misunderstood me anyway," his duplicate finally said. "I wasn't saying it was a bad thing, being human. I find I'm ... content." He laughed without much humour. "Happy, even."

"Yeah? That's good."

The other Doctor just stared across the canyon. "Yeah. Good."


	19. Chapter 19

Rose leaned over to tie the shoelaces on her trainers. "So what should we do after the nature walk?" she asked.

The Doctor in brown was sitting on the sofa of their suite, eating from the room service breakfast tray. "Well, we can grab a bite to eat, then what do you think, parasailing? That was fun last time." He crunched down on another piece of bacon.

"I ah-er 'oah oo 'each," the second Doctor called from the en-suite, where he was brushing his teeth.

"I have no idea what you just said," Rose called.

She heard the sound of spitting, and then the water running. Finally he emerged in his customary blue suit. Rose had years ago ceased teasing the Doctor for his unvaried wardrobe, even in the face of activities such as hiking. "I said, 'I'd rather go to the beach'."

Rose shrugged. "I'm sure we'll have plenty of time for both before the week is out. We can just play it by ear, I suppose." She hopped up from her chair. "Any chance we can tear you and your superior Time Lord metabolism away from the food so that we can get going?"

The first Doctor pretended to pout. "I have to replenish my energy stores after last night. It was quite strenuous."

She grinned. "It was, wasn't it?" In truth, she was surprised that she had as much energy as she did, given how little sleep she had gotten. 

Her second Doctor came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. "Go easy on him, Rose, he's an old man," he said, his voice full of mirth. He planted a kiss on the back of her neck, then pulled away and took her hand.

The Doctor cocked an eyebrow at his duplicate in blue as he dropped his napkin on his plate and stood up. "That's not what you were calling me last night while I was fu--"

"All right," Rose interrupted with an amused shake of her head. "Enough of that, let's go."

The banter continued in the lift, and Rose was trying in vain to suppress gales of laughter as the doors opened on a lower floor and two other guests stepped on. She only had eyes for her two Doctors, and so when the one in brown collapsed to the floor suddenly, his eyes rolling back in his head, nothing occurred to her other than that he was sick. "Doctor!" she shouted, dropping beside him. He was shuddering slightly, as if he were having a seizure, and Rose tried to stabilize his head as best she could.

The Doctor in blue joined her and began to check his pulse and his breathing, neither of them taking any notice of anything but their lover on the floor. 

"Oh dear," Rose heard the woman who had gotten onto the lift with them say. She moved around behind her second Doctor, leaning over him to inspect the Doctor on the floor. "Can I help?" Rose barely took notice of her, only peripherally aware of her plum-coloured skin.

"No, we're fine," her second Doctor bit out, pulling a stethoscope from his pocket. "We have a medical bay on our ship, we'll take him there."

"Actually, I don't think you will," the woman purred, pulling something from behind her back and pressing it to the part-human Doctor's neck. There was an arc of electricity as he screamed. Before Rose could move, she felt pressure on her own neck and then her nerves exploded in pain and everything went black.

 

***

 

The first thing the Time Lord became aware of was a buzzing in his ears. No, not in his ears - in his brain. It made it difficult to think, which was a strange sensation. He shook his head blearily and cracked open his eyes.

He was looking down at his own pinstriped legs. His head hung forward, he realized, and with a groan he lifted it. It felt like it weighed a ton, and his neck muscles protested mightily.

"The telepathic one is awake already," he heard a man's voice say from behind him. "You might need to hit him again."

"Not if you bound him securely," came a woman's voice, sounding irritable. "We need to talk to him, remember?" She walked around where he could see her, and with a sinking heart he recognized the purple-skinned woman from the restaurant. The one with the laugh that he felt inside his mind. He wanted to kick himself for his stupidity. She was dressed entirely in black leather, with long, silver hair that was pulled back into a braid. Beautiful, in a strange way. She peered into his face, not bothering to mask her frank curiosity. "What's your name?" she asked.

"What did you do to me?" he rasped.

"Just a telepathic pulse, enough to knock you out for an hour or so. The effects are all temporary." Indeed, the buzzing was starting to recede. "Your compatriots had to be taken out by more conventional means: an electric shock to the central nervous system." She pulled a chair up and sat across from him. Glancing around, the Doctor couldn't tell much about their whereabouts. It looked and echoed a bit like the inside of a large transport crate or storage unit; nothing but corrugated walls, a single overhead light and the few chairs. "Now, let's get down to business. What are you?"

The Doctor pulled against his restraints, but he seemed to be quite securely bound to his chair, his hands behind him and his feet tied together. "Where are the others?"

"Your twin-who-isn't-a-twin and the woman? They're secure, and if you want to see them again, I suggest you start answering my questions. What species are you?"

"Does it matter?"

"It will matter to the collectors to whom I cater. If you're a rare species, I can fetch a much higher price for you."

 _"Price?"_ he said incredulously. "Are you planning to sell me into slavery?"

"What they do with you isn't my concern. I only provide what they want - exotic creatures, and the more exotic the better. Since my computer can't even identify you, I'm thinking you might be the most exotic thing I've ever come across," she said with a greedy glint in her eye. "Not to mention your hybrid twin. I might fetch an even higher price for you as a set. I can hardly believe my good fortune, coming across you while I was on holiday myself."

"Oh, my twin's not even housebroken - completely worthless on the open market. You're better off chucking him back in the water. And the woman--"

"Is human," she finished dismissively. "Common as dirt, we've no interest in her."

"So you'll let her go?" he asked, trying for aloof disinterest.

"No, we'll kill her, obviously," she responded with an eye roll.

He ran quickly over 38th century Earth history and technology in his mind. "I wouldn't do that; she's the third daughter to the emperor of New Europa. If you kill her, you'll have a very large bounty on your heads. And you're wrong if you think my brother and I are worth anything, We're indentured to her family, and our DNA's been altered to keep us reliant on certain nutrients so that we won't escape, that's all. We aren't an exotic species, we're just rentboys who fell on hard times." He knew that with no norms to compare him to, her computer wouldn't be able to catch this lie about his genetics.

She tilted her head and met his eyes for a long moment. "You can put up mental barriers to keep me out of your mind, but it doesn't matter. The fact is, you're telepathic with a binary vasculature, while your twin is _not_ telepathic and has one heart. You can't convince me that's caused by genetic hobbling." 

The Doctor decided to try a different tactic. "If it's just money that you want--"

She cut him off with an amused snort. "If I had a credit for every time I'd heard that, I wouldn't need money. But no, it isn't just money - a catch like this could make my reputation. Now shut your mouth." She turned to her partner. "Bring the other male in here; perhaps he'll be more forthcoming." The man left the room.

After a couple of minutes, her accomplice returned with the other Doctor in tow. There was blood dripping from his lip and down his chin, but he shot the Doctor an exaggerated smile as he was manhandled into another chair and his hands were zip-tied behind him. _Rose?_ the Doctor mouthed at him. The Doctor in blue answered with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders.

The Doctor began speaking quickly. "I was just explaining to our friend here how we're genetically hobbled rentboys to the third daughter--"

"Don't bother to feed him your thin story, I already told you I don't believe a word of it." She walked over to the other Doctor and took his face roughly in her hand. "Tell me his species. _Now_."

"He's from Clom," his double said, "he's an Absor--"

"You aren't clever," she said, cutting him off as she shoved him roughly back, his chair rocking dangerously on its back legs. "Do you think I don't mean business? I'll bring your female in here and cut off her fingers one by one while you watch. And don't think I don't have the stomach for torture - just ask R'aal," she said, cocking a thumb at her accomplice. The Doctor noticed for the first time that he had six fingers on one hand but only four on the other. He swallowed against a suddenly dry mouth.

"You're Dranr'ai, yeah?" the Doctor in blue asked suddenly, referring to the species of their captors. "The Dranr'ai were always a peaceful people. You're not just telepathic, you're also incredibly _em_ pathic. How could you even bear to torture anyone?" 

She swooped close to the other Doctor and moved as if to kiss him. As soon as her mouth closed on his, he uttered a muffled scream, and when she pulled away, the Doctor could see more blood welling where she had bitten down on the other man's already-injured lip. The woman smiled, running her tongue around her teeth. "That's the thing; I _like_ pain." Looking over at R'aal, the Doctor could see him trembling.

Even after more than 900 years, he was still sometimes taken aback with the clarity that could be brought on by rage. "You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into," the Doctor said coldly. "If you hurt Rose, or if you hurt him again, I promise you that there is nowhere in the universe that you can run where I won't find you."

"Yeah, good luck with your vengeance quest from whatever zoo you end up locked in," she said dismissively. "Last chance: what planet are you from?"

He held her gaze for a long moment. "Gallifrey."

The woman looked at R'aal, shrugged, then looked back at the Doctors. "Never heard of it. Did you make that one up just now?"

Before he could answer, the Doctor felt a pulsing pressure against the telepathic barriers he had hastily erected, and he had to close his eyes to focus every effort on maintaining them. When it ended and he could finally open his eyes, both of the Dranr'ai were slumped on the floor, unconscious.

"What the hell?" the other Doctor asked, a few droplets of blood falling from his mouth onto his trousers.

"Some kind of telepathic field," he gasped. He'd managed to hold it out, but just barely, and he was going to have a hell of a headache pretty soon.

"Great," his duplicate said, hopping his chair as he tried to move it closer to the Doctor. "Now let's see if we can get free before they wake up."

At that point the door crashed open and Rose strode in. "Excellent, you're conscious," she said quickly to the Doctor in brown as she dropped to her knees in front of him and reached into one of his jacket pockets. "I thought you'd probably have mental barriers up and would be able to resist the psychomemetic pulse, putting these two out and leaving you two fine and dandy."

"Rose, what--"

"Aha!" She pulled out her prize, the sonic screwdriver, and began cutting his bindings. 

"A psychomemetic pulse?" the other Doctor asked. "How did you--"

"We're in an abandoned factory, and it has a loudspeaker system," she explained as she freed the Doctor's feet and moved on to his hands. "I was able to log onto their computer system and program it to produce a psychomemetic pulse, connected it to the loudspeaker, and boom! Instant incapacitation for any telepaths in the area who weren't shielding themselves." 

The words _'try the installation protocol'_ suddenly swam through the Doctor's mind, as he remembered a hospital on New Earth so many years ago, and that hint that all wasn't right with Rose's brain. His hands dropped to his sides as the zip-tie broke and Rose moved over to repeat the process with the other man. The Doctors' eyes met; both feared what this meant.

"Rose," the Doctor said carefully, "how did you know to do that?"

She turned and flashed a huge smile at him. "I was _waiting_ for you to ask me that! Because you know what? You were so thick, the both of you! A metacrisis has to work two ways, doesn't it? Apparently, I've had a Time Lord consciousness sleeping inside my mind for the last three months! Do you know what woke it up?" She finished cutting the other Doctor's restraints. "The electric shock from the tasers that those idiots were using!" she said, gesturing at their kidnappers. "Thank you, Dranr'ai!"

"How do you feel?" the other Doctor asked her, his face impassive.

" _Molto bene!_ " she chirped, as she examined his injured lip. "But never mind that! Let's get out of here before these two wake up."

The three of them left the room, which did turn out to be a very large shipping crate. Rose seemed to know the lay of the land, and so the two men followed her through the factory warehouse. The Doctor avoided meeting his duplicate's eyes now. Thoughts of what he would have to do to save her life flooded his mind. What would he do with her, after? Perhaps he could explain to Donna, and Donna could find someone to take care of her. Someone who was trustworthy, and who could tell Rose she was an amnesia victim. And he would have to walk away from her. Forever. He stumbled as he ran, swallowing against a lump in his throat.

When they got outside, they stopped to look around. Rose aimed the sonic screwdriver in several directions, and the Doctor watched her handle it the way _he_ always did, like it was an extension of her hand. "TARDIS is this way," she said, pointing. "About a mile and a half. We should be able to get to the hotel and contact the police before those two even know we're gone." She practically skipped off in the direction she had indicated, calling "Come on, you skinny boys in suits!" The two men followed her without a word.

"I mean, how brilliant is this?" she asked them after they had walked for about a minute. "Before we had one genius Time Lord mind working to save the world from all those dastardly foes, then we had two, and now we've got _three_! The bad guys don't stand a chance."

The Doctor forced himself to smile. "It's better than brilliant."

Rose continued to chatter happily all the way back to the hotel, where they contacted the local authorities to let them know about the Dranr'ai. When the police finished questioning them, another half hour had gone by, but Rose wasn't yet showing any ill effects from her transformation.

The Doctor in blue cleared his throat. "We've all been through quite an ordeal. I think we should go back to the TARDIS."

Rose frowned. "But I'm feeling fine! I say we have a bit of a kip in our room and then go on with our holiday like we planned."

"No, he's right," the Doctor said. "My head is killing me from withstanding that psychomemetic pulse, and I need something from the infirmary." Which wasn't untrue, but it wasn't his primary reason for wanting to get to his ship.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Doctor, how thoughtless of me," Rose said, stretching up and kissing his temple gently. "In that case, _Allons-y_!" she giggled.

The short walk to the TARDIS was peppered with more babbling from Rose. As she bounded up the ramp, she proclaimed, "I bet if you took a piece of TARDIS coral, shatterfried the plasmic shell and modified the dimensional stabiliser to a foldback harmonic of 36.3, you would accelerate growth by the power of 59! Before you knew it, you'd have a new TARDIS!"

"I never thought of that," the Doctor in blue said softly.

The Doctor felt like if he didn't have a moment alone to prepare for what he was going to have to do, he might lose his composure completely. Excusing himself, he stopped quickly in the infirmary and popped some pills for his pounding head, then continued on to the bedroom. Choking back a sob, he lay down on Rose's side of the bed, inhaling deeply from her pillow. He'd always known that eventually he would lose her, but this was too soon. He should have had decades remaining with her, but now it seemed that his time left with his wife was measured in hours or minutes. Worse, he was going to have to be the one to rob her of everything that she was. The thought that she would still be alive afterwards was cold comfort.

How could he come back into this bedroom after that? He tried to imagine it, lying down on this bed where she had slept every night, that usually smelled at least faintly of sex. If he did that, he didn't think he would ever get up again. He'd just have to seal this room off and never return to it. He doubted his duplicate would argue.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One final warning for extreme sadness. A few last lines from "Journey's End", by Russell T. Davies, in this chapter. Also, one scene in this chapter was inspired by "Forest of the Dead", by Stephen Moffat.

After allowing himself to wallow for several minutes, the Doctor dragged himself to his feet and walked back out to the console room. He came in just as the other Doctor was sweeping Rose into a hug. She was laughing, but then he saw her frown. 

"Are you okay?" she asked his duplicate.

"Yeah," the other Doctor said, "of course. Just … I love you. Never forget that I love you."

"Are you kidding?" Rose said with a laugh, pulling out of the embrace. "I'll never forget anything again, mind like a treel stap! I mean, teel strap!" She snickered and took a breath, shaking her head. "A steel trap."

The other Doctor flinched. "I'm going to go get something, okay sweetheart?" he said to Rose. "Don't go anywhere." As he passed the Doctor, he hissed, "Wait for me to get back."

Rose started circling the console. "I thought, after we left here we could try the planet Felspoon! Just because ... what a good name! Felspoon! Apparently, it's got mountains that sway in the breeze. I'm surprised you've never taken me there; you know, we wouldn't have to go near the time when you got in so much trouble."

He leaned back against one of the coral supports. "And how do you know about that?" the Doctor asked softly.

"Because it's in your head! And if it's in your head, it's in mine!"

"And how does that feel?"

"Brilliant! Fantastic! _Molto bene!_ Great big universe, packed into my brain! D'you know, you could fix that chameleon circuit if you just tried hotbindin' the fragment-links and supercedin' the binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary .." She gasped. "I'm fine!" Rose's eyes were wide. "Never mind Felspoon, d'you know who I'd like to meet? Charlie Chaplin! I bet he's great, Charlie Chaplin, should we do that? Go see Charlie Chaplin? I think the other Doctor would like it, let's ask him. Where'd he get off to? I need him, need him, need him, need him, need him, need him, need him, need him, need him to come back." She flinched, bringing a hand up to her head. _"Ow."_ Rose leaned heavily on the console. "Oh my god."

The Doctor approached her with caution. "Do you know what's happening?"

"Yeah," Rose answered without meeting his eyes.

"There's never been a Human-Time Lord metacrisis before, and you know why."

"Because there can't be," she said with no small amount of bitterness in her voice. Then she raised her eyes to him and he saw fear. "I need to stay," she said, so quietly he almost missed it, and she backed away - a cornered animal looking for escape.

"Look at me, Rose. Look at me." He closed his hands around her forearms and could feel her trembling.

"I'm your wife. I'm going to stay with you until I die." 

The Doctor felt his hearts clench. "Rose--"

Rose shook her head at him desperately. "No, you can't ... you _can't_ do this. You can't take it all. _Please_ ..."

His throat closed, and he worried that he couldn't speak. "There's no other way, Rose," the Doctor managed. "No other way to save you."

"Then let me go, if there's no other way," she said, her voice pleading, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"No." He hated doing this without the other Doctor present, but he was afraid the other man would side with Rose and try to stop him. The Doctor was even more afraid that if he delayed, he'd lose his nerve.

" _Let me die,_ don't do this, just let me die, I'd rather--"

"You know that's never going to happen." And then he was crying too. "I'd rather know that you're alive, somewhere, even if I can never see you again, I need to know that you're alive. Please, Rose, at least let me have that small scrap. Because I don't know if I can bear the grief otherwise."

She sagged against him, sobbing desperately. "I won't even know to miss you! It's not _fair_."

He put his hands against her temples. "I know. I love you. Please forgive me for this." And before he could second guess it, he sent a small pulse into her mind, enough to knock her unconscious, and caught her as she fell into his arms. The Doctor gritted his teeth and lowered her to the floor of the TARDIS slowly. Then he replaced his fingers on her temples and prepared to remove fifteen years of memories from his wife's mind.

 

***

 

_"Stop."_

The Time Lord's head jerked up. 

"Don't do it," the Doctor in blue continued, entering the room and dragging with him the armful of wires and cables and other equipment that he had been gradually stashing away in a closet for the last few weeks. "There's another way." Before the other man could protest, the Doctor shoved him out of the way, putting himself between his double and Rose. He immediately began applying electrodes to Rose's forehead. His hands were steady and sure. He had rehearsed this several times, alone, without either of them knowing. He had hoped he wouldn't have to ... well. No use thinking about that now.

"What other way?" the other Doctor asked suspiciously. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"Just realized it," he lied, continuing with his work. 

"Just realized _what_? What are you going to do?"

He sighed. "I've been studying our brain scans from Ariel. Mine and Rose's. And even though mine is Time Lord and hers is human, there are similarities in some of the structures, since part of me comes from her. I realized I can use that." The last electrode on Rose's head was in place. Time to do the other half. He pulled a small mirror from amongst his pile of junk and positioned it on the floor so he could see himself. That done, the Doctor began sorting through the tangle of electrodes, preparing to attach them to his own head.

The other Doctor was getting more and more anxious. "Use it _how?_ What could you possibly do that wouldn't ..." He finally seemed to see the device that the Doctor was wiring himself and Rose to. _"No."_

"It'll work. The Time Lord consciousness will be drawn out of her and into me," he said briskly.

"And create a feedback loop in your brain, it'll kill you stone dead!" the other Doctor shouted.

"Maybe not," he said mildly.

His duplicate wasn't fooled. "You know it will. You'll die and you won't regenerate. You can't do this, Doctor." The other man reached down, as if to pull the wires off of Rose's forehead, but the Doctor was prepared for that. The Doctor in blue jumped up and shot a hand out, pushing the other Doctor back, dropping the wires that were in his other hand. 

"I think there's something you haven't considered yet, Doctor," he said to his double, palms held up in a non-threatening gesture.

"What?"

The punch that he threw was perfectly placed, and the Doctor in brown collapsed to the floor of the console room, out cold.

 

***

 

Assuming they hadn't been telepathically meddled with, Time Lords didn't return to consciousness slowly, left with any lingering grogginess. One second, they were completely unconscious, the next, completely awake and alert. 

The Doctor jerked up, taking in lungfuls of air, his eyes snapping open. The first thing he saw was Rose, still on the floor, still unaware. Electrodes led from her head to an assortment of equipment, then back out to the head of the other Doctor. The Doctor who was making adjustments to that equipment now, the sonic screwdriver buzzing in his hand.

He tried to lurch forward, to stop him, but something jerked back on his arm. Looking behind him, he saw one of his hands securely handcuffed to one of the metal rails that surrounded the console. The other Doctor glanced at him, but didn't stop working.

"This is suicide," the Doctor gasped, pulling ineffectually against the handcuff.

"I know. I was lying when I implied I might survive this." He said it mildly, like he was commenting on the weather. "I know I won't, so we don't need to argue about that."

The other man sounded so calm, so certain of his actions, and the Doctor felt panic rising in his chest. "Rose wouldn't want this. At least my way, everyone survives."

"I'm not sure I'd qualify Rose's state after losing all those memories as survival. And after you stripped her brain bare of everything that makes her the woman we love, then what? Drop her off on Earth, find someone to look after her? And then you and I head off in the TARDIS?"

"Yes," he answered quickly. "Why not?"

The other Doctor snorted, his eyes flicking back and forth over the readouts on an oscilloscope. "I'm a poor substitute for Rose in your life, Doctor."

"At least we wouldn't be alone," the Doctor said desperately. He had to stop this. He _had_ to. "I can feel you inside my mind," he confessed. Why had he never told the other man this before? "I know you can't feel it, I know that aspect of being a Time Lord is lost to you, but _I_ can. That place in my brain that's been silent since the Time War, since they all died, it hasn't been silent since you ran out of the TARDIS into the Crucible. I can feel you there, Doctor, inside my mind." He gasped raggedly. "You can't do this."

The other man finally met his eyes. "I'm sorry," he said sympathetically. "But you'll have Rose, you'll have your wife."

"She's _your_ wife too! And she'll never forgive me if you die." He had pulled himself as close to the other man as he could get, his shoulder beginning to ache as he stretched his handcuffed arm to the limit.

"That's part of why I handcuffed you. When she wakes up, she'll see that you couldn't have stopped me. She won't blame you. You'll have each other." His voice finally started to betray some emotion, breaking on the last word. "You love her more than you've ever loved anyone. The two of you should be together for as long as you can, for the rest of her life." Leaning over, the Doctor, part Time Lord, part human, placed a reverent kiss on Rose's cheek. He sat back up and smiled sadly, pulling a switch box into his lap. "Love her for me."

"Stop. Just ... _don't._ Think about this." The Doctor scrabbled ineffectually at the floor. "You don't have to sacrifice yourself. You're just as important to us as--"

"I know. And I wish, more than anything, that the three of us could live this way forever." A tear slid down his cheek. "But we can't. I'm not meant to stay here, Doctor. I've served my purpose, and I'm so glad that I got to exist, that I got to experience life, even if it was only for a few months. It was still brilliant, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world." He put his finger on the switch, the other Doctor's eyes never wavering from him. "I love you."

He opened his mouth to speak, but at first no sound came out. "Doctor," he finally managed. "I--"

The Doctor in blue threw the switch.

 

***

 

Rose Tyler woke to a piercing headache, and it was several seconds before she could open her eyes. She rolled onto her right side, still with her eyes squeezed shut, and moaned softly at the pain in her head. When she finally managed to crack her eyelids open, all she could make out was the blurry brown shape of her first Doctor, and that she was in the console room. Suddenly, memories of the last thing that happened before she blacked out flooded in and she jerked upright. The Doctor was going to take her memories away ... to save her life, he was going to ... but, he hadn't. She remembered her life, obviously. She was married to the Doctor, no, to two of them. One Time Lord, one part-human. Images, sounds, events flashed through her mind. If there were memories missing, she wasn't aware of it. There was one thing missing, though - the rush of Time Lord thoughts that had been tearing her mind apart. She was just Rose Tyler. Fighting against the pulsing pain in her head, she crawled toward the brown shape of her husband. She was vaguely aware something attached to her forehead, and she thoughtlessly ripped it away.

When he finally swam into focus, she saw that his face was streaked with tears. His shoulders were shaking; he was sobbing. "Doctor," she croaked out. "Doctor, I'm here, I'm okay." She tried to hug him from her awkward position on the floor. "Whatever you did, it worked. My memories are still here, I'm still me. Please don't cry. It worked."

The eyes that he turned on her were brimming with grief. "I didn't ... I'm sorry." His breath hitched. "I'm so sorry, I couldn't stop him."

"Stop ... what?" Her vision had finally cleared enough that she could focus. "Is that a handcuff? How ...?" It was then that it occurred to her to look around for her other Doctor. Turning, it took her a moment to process that he was actually lying on the floor, near where she had regained consciousness. "Doctor?"

Rose pulled herself up and stumbled over to him. There were wires attached to his forehead, leading to a machine, then out to ... is that what had been attached to her head before? Those wires? She dropped to her knees and picked up his wrist, feeling for a pulse. There was nothing. 

Blood pounding in her head, Rose leaned over and pressed her ear to his chest, trying to listen for that single heartbeat. 

"Doctor, he's not ... his heart's not beating." She sounded so calm to her own ears. "We've got to restart his heart." She saw the handcuff key on a chain loosely looped around her second Doctor's wrist, and she pulled it off and ran over to the other Doctor to free him. "Help me," she instructed as the handcuff clanked onto the grated floor.

"It's too late, Rose. He's brain dead." the Doctor said flatly.

"You don't know that." She was beside him again, the Doctor who was so very still, and she started CPR, counting to herself as she pumped on his chest. "We have a defibrillator, go get it." She sealed her mouth over her second Doctor's and blew. His lips were cold.

Then the Time Lord was beside her. "Rose," he said quietly, "do you see that line on the oscilloscope there?" He pointed to the readout on the machinery that was hooked up to her other Doctor. "That reads his brain waves. There's nothing, it's flat. He's gone."

"He can't be," Rose insisted, pumping on his chest. "You're wrong, he _can't_ be."

"I'm sorry."

She breathed into the other Doctor's mouth again. " _Don't._ Don't say that, he's not ... we can save him."

"Even if we restart his heart, it won't help. Rose, stop," he said, trying to pull her hands away. 

Her calm shattered. " _NO!_ You _wanted_ him dead, you _let_ this happen because you wanted me all to yourself!" The Doctor was trying to hold her and she beat against his chest, her own heart thundering in her ears.

"You know that isn't true. I loved him." He held her closer, letting her hit him, not letting her go. "I loved him, Rose." She heard his voice break, and the sound of it released the lock on her own sobs. Clutching the lapels of his brown jacket, Rose keened. 

She had no idea how long they sat there on the floor, holding each other and crying. When Rose became aware of her surroundings again, the Doctor was slowly rocking her and stroking her hair, and her face was pressed against his now-damp chest. She pulled away from him slowly, forcing herself to look down at the other Doctor's body. Reaching out with a trembling hand, she touched his pale face and combed her fingers through his hair gently. "This is my fault."

"No."

"He did this to save me. So that you wouldn't have to take my memories."

The Doctor uttered a shuddering sigh. "Yes."

Rose continued to touch his hair, smoothing it down. "It's not fair."

"I swear, Rose, I didn't know he was planning this, or I would have stopped it."

She held up her hand to stop him. "You don't have to ... I know. I'm sorry I said that you wanted this."

"It's forgotten."

Letting her fingers run down the smooth silk of her second Doctor's tie, Rose shivered. She felt so terribly empty. "What do we do now?"

"I don't ... Time Lords almost always had funeral pyres, so I suppose ..." He seemed unable to voice any more.

Rose flinched, fresh tears coming to her eyes. There was still a part of her that was hoping he would wake up, even as she felt the chill of his skin, the stillness of his chest. "He's dead," she said, trying to make it real.

The Doctor in brown stood up suddenly, walking stiffly over to the console. He began putting the TARDIS in motion, darting from one control to another. Picking up the other Doctor's cold hand and clutching it to her chest, Rose lay down on the floor of the TARDIS and watched the rotor move up and down. She didn't think she'd ever heard the engines sounding so mournful.


	21. Chapter 21

It was impossible not to think about the last time he had been in this position as the heat of the flames burned his cheeks and the sparks fluttered in the wind. The Doctor let his fingers go slack and the torch he held fell to the earth. 

_"Regenerate, just regenerate. Please, please just regenerate, come on."_

There was bitter irony in the fact that Master had been granted so many chances at life and had bolloxed up every one, while the Doctor's duplicate had only the one, terribly short life.

_"We're the only two left, there's no one else. REGENERATE!"_

The Doctor turned to look at Rose, who was standing next to the TARDIS and watching the flames. He had encouraged her to stay back from the pyre; the fact was that no matter which wood was used or what aromatic herbs were included, you could always smell the burning flesh. It was horrific, but at the same time, it helped to make it real for him. The body that had been created three months ago, that miraculous man whose existence had saved the universe, really was gone.

Perhaps it was the universe's way of balancing the scales. A man who was both so brilliant and so full of love couldn't continue to exist, and the last Time Lord in the world couldn't continue to be so happy.

The Doctor couldn't even be comforted by the morbid wish that the other Doctor had never existed. The threads of their lives were too tangled together; without the need to create the second Doctor, Dalek Caan never would have set the things in motion that led to his getting Rose back from the parallel world. Even assuming he had found another way to get to Rose, he would have lost her and the TARDIS that day without the other Doctor. The thing he was most certain of was that the better of the two of them had died. 

At some point, Rose went inside, but he stayed and watched the fire burn until there was nothing left but ash. He picked up the vessel he'd brought with him and carefully swept as much of the ash as he could into it, then he went back into the TARDIS.

The console room was empty and quiet. The Doctor set the ashes down on the jumpseat and numbly walked to the bedroom. Rose was curled up on the bed asleep, her pillow still wet with tears. Her mouth was slightly open and one hand clutched the duvet on which she lay. He envied her ability to still cry; he found that his tears had dried up. Shedding his coat and suit, he carried them to the TARDIS laundry so that she wouldn't have to smell the smoke when she woke up. Dragging himself into the shower, the Doctor stood under the hot spray until long after the pads of his fingers had pruned, staring at the bare wall in front of him and listening to the aching silence inside his mind.

 

***

 

Rose awoke to find the Doctor fresh from a shower, sitting at the foot of the bed with a towel around his waist. One look in his eyes dashed any faint hope she'd had that it had all been a bad dream.

"Is it done?" she asked, her voice raspy.

He nodded.

"Did you move the TARDIS yet?" The Doctor looked away and shook his head. His silence was so foreign, Rose hardly knew how to respond to it. "Shouldn't we go ahead and–"

"There's no rush, Rose. We don't have to do everything today." He looked exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes.

"Okay," she agreed, sitting up. "I think I'll shower too." 

When she emerged back into the bedroom after her shower, more tears lost down the drain and her face scrubbed clean, the Doctor was in bed, staring at the ceiling. He was wearing pyjamas, and she honestly couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him in bed when he wasn't naked. The fact was, he almost never slept other than after sex. Pulling on a T-shirt and knickers, Rose joined him under the covers and turned off the lamp. For a long time, they were silent, on opposite sides of what suddenly seemed like a very large bed.

"What I wouldn't give right now for the ability to sleep for several hours at a stretch," the Doctor finally said into the darkness.

"It does provide a nice escape sometimes," Rose responded.

"Can I … would it be all right if I held you?" he asked hesitantly.

In answer, Rose shifted close to him and pulled him into a hug. The muscles of his back were knotted into tight cords, and she rubbed his shoulders. He pressed his face against her neck and breathed deeply.

The Doctor relaxed a fraction, and was silent so long that Rose began to wonder if he had fallen asleep when he spoke again. "I miss him."

"Me too," she whispered. He didn't say anything else, and eventually she managed to retreat back into sleep.

 

***

 

Rose remembered grief. When she first got lost in the parallel world, grief had been an almost-constant companion. There were mornings when she woke up disoriented, unsure of where she was and why she wasn't on the TARDIS, and had to suffer a fresh blow as reality hit her all over again. There were mornings when she didn't wake at all because, in her too-quiet room, she'd never fallen asleep in the first place. And there were mornings when she woke after a night filled with dreams of Daleks and Cybermen and levers and white walls and of the Doctor screaming her name. Those mornings there was no need to remember it anew, because she awoke with pain like a solid weight on her chest. This was how she felt the morning after her second Doctor died.

She was alone and wondered if the other Doctor had slept at all; she doubted he had. Dragging herself out of bed, she threw on jeans and a jumper and tied her hair back in a ponytail before venturing out of the bedroom. Rose went first to the kitchen out of habit and the sight of her Doctor making breakfast, her coffee brewing like always, made tears spring to her eyes. 

He turned and smiled sadly at her. "Hi."

"Hi."

He put a plate down on the table. "I made you some toast; do you want anything else?"

Rose shook her head. "I'm not hungry."

"You need to eat."

Lacking the energy to argue, Rose sat down and took a small bite. The Doctor joined her and they sat in silence for a while. "How long do you think he knew?" she asked.

"Knew what?"

"What he was going to do."

The Doctor eyed her with fear, and when he finally spoke she understood why. "He probably figured it out not long after he had time to study the brain scans from Ariel."

Rose wondered how she could have been so naïve. "So both of you knew all along what might happen. And you never told me."

"We didn't want to worry you, Rose."

" _You_ didn't want me to know that you planned to take all of my memories away to save my life, because you knew I wouldn't allow it. And _he_ didn't want me to know that he was planning to kill himself to stop that from happening." She shook her head in exasperation. "You really were very much the same man."

"He was better." The Doctor sighed. "If you had to lose one of us--"

"Don't. Don't say that. Don't even think it, you'll go mad. I love you, and I loved him, and I loved you before you regenerated. I'll love you no matter what form you take." She smiled thinly. "Also, clearly you'll drive me mad no matter what form you take."

"Clearly." He scratched the back of his neck. "I'm sorry we didn't tell you."

"If you had, I don't suppose things would have ended up differently, would they? We just would have spent three months arguing with each other. In the end, the two of you would have done exactly the same thing." Which was true, but Rose was startled at how adept she was at sweeping this so typically Doctorish behaviour under the rug. She remembered suddenly what he'd said to her about the metacrisis right before they said goodbye to Mickey and her mother: _"If it had happened when we were first reunited, before I loved you too much, I might have left you here with him."_ Even after all these years, he decided what was best for her and he did it. What worried her was how easily she accepted it.

The Doctor had turned inward, his eyes a million miles away. When he spoke, his voice was soft and hesitant. "Is it ..."

Rose waited for him to continue, but he didn't seem inclined to. "Is it what?"

"Is it hard for you to look at me?" He scrubbed a hand through his hair. "You know, because ..."

"Because you look like him?" She found she had to think about it. "It might be, sometimes." She took his hand. "I know that you're you, but ... yeah, it might be." She took a sip of her coffee. "Is it hard to look in the mirror?"

He smiled a small, bitter smile. "I'll let you know when I can bring myself to do it."

Rose was up from the table in an instant, coming around and hugging him tightly. She stood between his legs, his face against her chest, her fingers combing the hair at the nape of his neck. "We're gonna get through this, right? Please tell me we're gonna get through this. Because right now, it feels like ..." She choked back a sob, unable to go on.

"I know," he said simply, and then he looked up at her, cupping her cheek. "We're going to get through this," he said with sudden conviction. Rose could do no other than believe him. 

"Let's go, then. I'm ready."

The Doctor took her hand and they walked to the console room together. She helped him pilot the TARDIS, a habit she had started to fall out of when there had been three of them. When they arrived, he picked up the box from the jumpseat and Rose followed him out into the bright sun.

New Earth was just as she remembered it. He'd chosen a different part of the peninsula from the spot where they'd gotten married, but it was still the New Earth she knew, apple grass and all. The smell of the place made her heart lurch; she'd only repeated her wedding vow to the other Doctor two days before, and now they were here to say goodbye to him. Why did it still surprise her when the path of her life changed so quickly?

For the longest time, they only stood still, staring out over the water. Finally Rose spoke. "Should we have done something more permanent, do you think? A marker or something?"

The Doctor frowned. "I don't know. We did have tombs; some Time Lords did, anyway. But I never put much stock in … I reckon the only marker of your life that means anything is the way others remember you."

Rose felt tears welling behind her eyes. "Then I don't think we have anything to worry about, do we?"

"No."

"He came from us. The things he did - saving our lives, making our marriage better, laughing with us, loving us - those things came from us too, in a way."

"Yes, I suppose they did."

"And it was worth it. Even though it hurts so badly right now, it was worth it." She tried to sound like she believed it; probably someday she would believe it. Right now, with the pain of their loss making it hard to breathe, the words were hollow.

The Doctor nodded, his face carefully blank.

Suddenly Rose just wanted to flee. She wanted to get this over with and go, felt it like something buzzing under her skin. She gestured toward the water. "Why don't you ..."

The Doctor stepped to the edge of the promontory they stood on and opened the box. He said something softly, and while Rose couldn't hear him, the shape of his mouth as he spoke the words made Rose think it might be his native language. He threw the other Doctor's ashes out over the water, letting the wind catch them and carry them into the ocean. Without a word, Rose turned and walked quickly back into the TARDIS.

 

***

 

It was the silence that drove him to seek her out. He'd grown accustomed to spending almost all of his time with either one or the other of them, or with both. More importantly, he'd grown accustomed to the other Doctor's warm presence in the back of his mind. He wanted to give Rose the space that she seemed to need right now, but eventually being alone became intolerable and he tracked her down in a little-used sitting room. He expected her to be angry with him for intruding - she wouldn't be hiding in a random room on the TARDIS if she wanted to see him - but she only looked relieved when he walked through the door. She was off the sofa and in his arms immediately, and before he quite knew what was happening, her mouth was on his neck. The Doctor froze for just a moment out of genuine surprise, but then he felt a surge in his hearts and his groin - suddenly he wanted her so badly that he was trembling with it. 

Their mouths met in a kiss that was frantic and hard enough to hurt. Clothes came off in a flurry, and afterwards he couldn't remember when he'd taken his shoes off or how her jeans had ended up over by the door. There wasn't any foreplay; Rose pulled him down on top of her on the sofa, her jumper still on, and he sank inside her gratefully. Every hard thrust from him pushed her back against the cushions, and he felt her legs wrap around him and her nails sink into his shoulders. Rose kept her eyes clamped shut, but she came quickly with a soft moan. It took him significantly longer; with every thrust he tried to forget what was missing, to push his grief aside and be in the moment, but he couldn't quite manage it. When he opened his eyes, she was watching him.

"I love you," Rose whispered.

He pressed his forehead against hers, feeling the warmth of her through every point of contact between them. Finally he was able to climax, almost sobbing with relief. 

They held each other for a long time after, suspended in limbo between the sadness that was making them both withdraw and the intimacy they were sharing. Rose's fingers combed through his hair again and again, her eyes open and miles away. "He loved you too, you know. I don't know if he ever said it, but–"

"He did." He hoped she wouldn't ask when. He hoped he'd never have to tell her that the other Doctor had ended his life before he could hear him say it back.

 

***

 

Time passed for them, even on the TARDIS. They stayed in the Vortex for several days – she gardened and he fixed things that didn't need fixing. They watched films together in silence, and they made love, they talked and they grieved, alone and together. Eventually, they travelled – a new planet, one that Rose had never been to and that he hadn't seen in over 500 years. In some ways, life began to resemble what it had been before. Before the other Doctor, before Davros, before the Ixari. They were the Doctor and Rose, after all. If the strangers they met could see the sadness in their eyes, if they could discern the shadow that followed them around, they didn't remark on it. 

Rose had heard people talk about the stages of grieving, but it didn't make it any easier when some days she wanted to smash her fist through the nearest plate glass window at the injustice of it all, and other days she could barely drag herself out of bed, depression weighing heavy on her chest. An idea started to form, one that at first she dismissed as selfish and cruel, but as the weeks wore on seemed to make more and more sense. 

He brought them to Earth; South Carolina specifically. It was July, hot and so humid that she felt like she could almost see the moisture hanging in the air. They were standing under the Angel Oak, a massive live oak with limbs larger than most tree trunks she had seen, limbs that ran along the ground and even underground in places. She walked up to the trunk and stretched her arms as far they would reach. She was only barely able to perceive the curvature of it, much less begin to put her arms around it.

"This is the best time to see it," the Doctor was saying. "Well, not this time of year – I was aiming for spring but I seem to have missed it by a few months. I mean this time in history; not long after this they have to start using cables to support some of the limbs so that they don't break under their own weight. It's never quite the same after that."

"Doctor?"

"So do you fancy some seafood? Best would be if we can find one of those little family-owned establishments – everything fried and tea sweet enough to make your teeth ache. It's _brilliant_."

"Doctor, I need you to listen to me for a minute."

"Rose, I'm always listening to you," he protested. "What is it?"

"I need to say something, and I don't want you to take it the wrong way," Rose said.

His eyes widened at that admittedly ominous statement. He'd left his overcoat on the TARDIS, but it didn't stop him from folding himself up to sit on the ground. Rose joined him, leaning back on her hands and watching the Spanish moss that clung to the tree sway in the breeze.

"What is it?" he repeated softly.

She turned to look at him. "I think I need some time on my own." His panicked expression made her flinch. "See, you're already taking it the wrong way. I mean temporarily; just a few weeks. I love you, I still want to be your wife, I still want to spend my life with you. But right now, I need this."

"Why?"

Rose sighed. "It's difficult for me, walking the halls of the TARDIS. Sometimes I half expect to see him coming around the corner. I catch a glimpse of something blue and I think … I wake up in our bed and for a moment I'm wondering where he's got off to. And yes, I mean, you were right – sometimes it _is_ hard to look at you when you wear the same face."

"I'll regenerate, then."

"Shut up," she said, smacking him on the arm. "I just need some time away to get my head together. For that matter, it might do you some good to do the same thing."

He obviously wasn't convinced. "But you don't want to be away and _together_."

"Think of it as my memorial to him. He came into this world as a duplicate of another man. A man with a superior physiology and longer life span, a man that was already married to his wife. And in spite of that, he made an indispensable place for himself in the world. He was his own man."

"I don't understand."

Rose struggled to put her feelings into words without hurting the Doctor's feelings. "One thing that I came to terms with a long time ago was that I was committing to live my life in the shadow of the most amazing man in the world."

"You don't–"

"In a way, I do. How could I not? You are so much smarter than me, and you live, comparatively, forever. You have the entire universe at your disposal. Even now, you keep me on a need-to-know basis when it comes to _my own health_ because you are, quite simply, the biggest control freak in the universe. And I gave up trying to change that about you years ago. But that doesn't mean I'm not still angry, on some level.

"The last thing I want is to come out of this with our marriage in worse shape than it was before he was with us. I think for me to come to terms with all of this: with loving both of you, with losing him, with almost losing my memories, all of it, I just need some time to … what was it Donna used to say? To walk in the dust."

He was looking down at the ground, and after a moment he nodded, resigned. "Where will you go?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. Thought I might do something really mad like go to an airport on 21st-century Earth and board a plane."

Finally he looked up at her and raised an eyebrow, the faintest hint of a smile on his face. "You know you need a passport for that, yes?" She just grinned at him until he threw up his hands in mock disgust, fished in his jacket pocket, and handed over the psychic paper.


	22. Chapter 22

Michael Milligan turned the page of his Lego instruction book, studied the diagrams, and began picking through the pile of pieces on the kitchen table. _Finally_ his little sister Sophie wasn't pestering him and he had some free time to put his Star Wars Y-wing fighter together. It was Boxing Day, or at least, it was in Great Britain where they were from; in New York, no one knew what Boxing Day was. The constant drone of football ( _soccer_ , he mentally corrected himself - his American school mates called it soccer) on the telly came from the next room, where Sophie was playing with the giant dollhouse that he had been goaded into helping her put together the day before. His mum had gotten a call on her mobile a little while ago, and had retreated into his parents' bedroom to talk. They always did that when they talked about things that they didn't want him to hear.

"Martha, what do you mean, on his own?" It was Dad. He was following Mum into the kitchen, and they were talking to each other with their serious faces on. Michael wasn't sure if they'd noticed he was there.

"That's what he said, that he'd like to come spend some time with us on his own." Mum had her arms crossed over her chest like she was getting ready for an argument. Michael knew that look well.

"Where's Rose?"

Michael knew who Rose was; that was the Doctor's wife. He started listening more closely.

"I'm not entirely clear on that. All he said was, she's taking some time by herself."

"Well that doesn't seem too healthy, does it? I mean, if they've just lost ..." He trailed off with a quick glance in Michael's direction. Michael quickly looked down at his Legos again.

"To be honest, I'm mostly concerned that he's only just now getting around to telling us. It was several weeks ago that it happened," Mum said in a low voice.

His dad huffed. "And they didn't call us sooner? Shouldn't they be turning to their friends?"

"You know how the Doctor is. Besides, we didn't really know him, did we? I mean, we did and we didn't." She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. "It's an odd situation." Michael didn't understand what his mother could mean by that. Of course they knew the Doctor!

"Even more so for them, I'm sure." His dad reached out and pulled his mum into a hug. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get tetchy about it; of course he can stay with us for as long as he needs to."

Michael couldn't be unobtrusive any more. "The Doctor's gonna stay with us?" he asked.

His mum looked over at him and smiled. "Yep, for at least a few days. Won't that be lovely?"

"Awesome!" Michael enthused.

His dad frowned. "Since when do you say 'awesome'?"

They told him that the Doctor would arrive in a few hours, and then went off to do whatever parents did to prepare for a guest. For Michael, the hours dragged by. He finished his Y-wing, then he played with it for a bit. Then he partially dismantled it and played with the dismantled parts, then he put it back together. Then he pestered his sister, going for bombing runs over her dollhouse while she whinged at him to stop. He played on his computer for a few minutes, but found he was too fidgety to sit still. Then he looked out the window for a while. 

He expected the TARDIS to materialise in their front hall the way it had a few months before, so he was disappointed when there was simply a knock on the door, and his mum opened it to reveal the Doctor. He was carrying a backpack, which looked odd with his brown-pinstriped suit. He and Michael's mum hugged for a long time, and then she took his hand and led him into the kitchen. They didn't even look Michael's way. 

 

***

 

Martha set a mug of tea down in front of the Doctor. It took her back suddenly to her life on the TARDIS, to routine mornings in the kitchen, to the way every move she had made felt calculated to get him to notice her, to look at her and really _see_ her. It had been both the most wonderful and the worst time in her life. She shook her head. And it had been a lifetime ago.

She sat across from him with her own tea. "I have to admit, I'm surprised to see you with a bag; I figured you'd just go back to the TARDIS for anything you needed."

"It's not far - in the park across the street." He sighed. "But Rose wanted me to get out for a bit, and I'm loathe to disobey her."

"You look tired," Martha said softly.

He rested an elbow on the table and ran a hand into his hair, then he gave her an ironic smile. "Guess I am. Which is strange, because I've been sleeping. Been sleeping a lot, more than I ever do."

"What, like, two hours a night?" she said with a smile.

The Doctor looked slightly affronted. "Not _that_ much." His expression slid back to the morose one he'd been wearing before. Martha used to marvel at how much emotion was sometimes visible in those big, brown eyes of his. She took his hand. "Tell me."

"It was the metacrisis, the way he was created. Turns out, there was no way for both of them to exist, he and Rose. Not intact, anyway." Martha could tell there was more to that statement than he was letting on, but she didn't press. "So he sacrificed himself for her. So that she could ... stay."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah," he said, looking up at the ceiling.

"Must be hard for Rose to be widowed and yet ... not. That is, if they were ..." Martha realised she didn't know the nature of Rose's relationship with the other Doctor, and she sure as hell wasn't going to ask.

"They were," he said shortly, which she supposed answered _that_ question. "He had all the same memories of our marriage; they happened to him as surely as they happened to me."

"I bet that was difficult for you."

"At first it was; I adjusted. We weren't rivals."

Martha tried to wrap her mind around that. "I suppose it was like having a brother?"

The Doctor laughed mirthlessly. "It was a bit more complicated than that." He waved the subject away with a flick of his hand. "Doesn't matter."

"So why this separation?"

"Rose is trying really hard not to be, but deep down, she's furious with me. And she's furious with him too, even as she grieves for him and misses him." He rubbed both hands over his face.

"Why?"

"We knew that the metacrisis had put her life in danger. Knew it months ago and didn't tell her. And I'd like to say that our motives were pure, that it was just that we didn't want to worry her, but that's not all of it. It was also that we both had our own secret plans for how to save her, and we didn't want to give her the chance to refuse."

"Wow. No wonder she's furious."

"Thanks for your support," he retorted, staring into his tea. "She called me the biggest control freak in the universe."

Martha couldn't help it, she laughed. It was just too perfect a description of him.

The Doctor's lips twitched into a half smile and he sighed. "I suppose it's a fair cop." He leaned back in his chair. "And she wanted some time away from the TARDIS, away from the place that held so many memories of the other Doctor, of the few months the three of us were together. She says it's just a bit of time travelling separately, it's not a separation. That she doesn't want to leave me. I hope that's true. It had been a tough year for us, even before the Daleks."

"The war made it a tough year for all of us."

"Yeah." He rubbed one eye violently with his index finger. 

This was the point in the conversation where her job was to be reassuring, Martha knew. "I'm sure once she's had some time to deal with all of it, the two of you can reconnect." She had no idea whether what she was saying was true or not, since she didn't know what was going on in Rose's head. 

"For most of my centuries of living, I ran away from grief and loss. I've had companions who died before, and I just kept moving, kept travelling, filled my life with adventure so that I didn't have to dwell on it, so that I could forget."

" _Did_ you forget?" Martha asked.

He looked askance at her. "I know what you're trying to say. "

"I'm trying to say that it's healthy to allow yourself time to feel loss."

"That's easy for you to say. If I'd let myself really, truly feel the loss of my people in the Time War, I wouldn't have survived it. And when the time comes and I lose Rose … " His Adam's apple bobbed. "Defence mechanisms are there for a reason; sometimes they save us."

There was nothing Martha could say to that. Even with all the death and destruction she'd seen, it was still only a tiny fraction of what the Doctor had experienced. "Well, I'm glad you came to us anyway."

"Me too." He smiled and then looked around. "Now, where are those beautiful children of yours? I think it's high time that you paraded them in front of me to show them off, don't you?"

 

***

 

Rose walked down Market Street in San Francisco. He'd taken her to Haight-Asbury in 1969 once, before they were married. She'd blended in with the hippies, smoking their dope and listening to their protest songs and letting them braid her hair. This was different; although the streets were still populated with a rather large assortment of homeless people, they stood incongruously against the backdrop of the Apple Store or Borders, and the change cups they jingled were more often than not from Starbucks or another gourmet coffee chain.

She kept pace with the commuters and shoppers and students and tourists, taking in the riot of sound and colour. She strolled along the Embarcadero, buying chocolates at an upscale market and looking out over the bay. There was a part of her that felt desperately lonely. More than that, she felt small – one anonymous traveller on this one planet at this one particular time in history. There was another part of her that felt strangely free, in charge of her own destiny. She hopped a bus to Golden Gate Park and sat in the Japanese garden, enjoying the silence and stillness of it. Silence and stillness were not something she got to experience very often.

It was the chocolates that determined her next destination; the next day she was stepping off a plane in Brussels. The TARDIS was far enough away that the translation circuit wasn't working for her, but it didn't matter; everyone spoke English. She took a taxi to the old part of the city and booked a room in a hotel off the Grand Place. For the next few days she wandered the snarl of old streets, each of them with two names, one in French and one in Dutch. She visited museums and ate mussels and drank wine in the Rue des Bouchers.

Rose felt like she was in limbo - a kind of grief purgatory. She didn't feel the sadness as acutely as she once had, and she knew she was starting to heal. At the same time, she couldn't really say she was enjoying her travels. She was too detached - a dandelion seed floating wherever the breeze took her, but not making an impression on anyone or anything. Still, it did feel good to be on her own, to do things because _she_ wanted to, whether it was taking a long afternoon nap or eating an ice cream cone for breakfast. 

Eventually it was on to Thailand. After so many years of living on relative time and with a man who almost never slept, Rose did not get jet lag. Her first night in Bangkok, she put on a low-cut dress because she missed being admired, and she sat at the bar of her five-star hotel, nursing a drink which claimed to be some sort of martini, but had too many fruity ingredients to be deserving of the name.

A woman in a severe business suit sat next to her at the bar and ordered single malt Scotch, neat. "It's truly a global society; I can go to any city in the world and get fifteen year old Glenmorangie," the woman said in an American accent.

Rose hummed noncommittally. "You travel a lot for your job?" she asked.

"Yeah," the woman said with an exhausted sigh. "You?"

"Not for my job, but I do travel a lot, yeah." She took a sip of her drink and then held out her hand. "I'm Rose."

"Nice to meet you Rose, I'm Naomi. Where you from?"

"London."

"Thought so. I'm from Minneapolis originally, but I've been in Paris for the last two years."

"Do you like it?" Rose asked politely.

"No, not particularly," Naomi said with a shrug, then looked around. "You're not here with anyone?"

Rose shook her head. "Usually my husband and I travel together, but I'm on my own just now. Which is probably something I shouldn't have told you," Rose said with a laugh. "You're not an axe murderer, are you?"

Naomi smiled. "I was, but I gave it up. Too much hassle, getting rid of the bodies." Then she sighed. "So you're married, and thus my plan to try to pick you up is probably for naught."

Rose regarded Naomi for a moment – she was a mixture of Asian and Caucasian, with pale skin and dark, silky hair. Sophisticated and beautiful, and Rose felt a small twinge of attraction. "I'm flattered," Rose said, "but yeah, it's probably for naught." She ran a finger around the rim of her drink. "Because here I am in a foreign city, sitting here in this sexy dress, and all I can think about is that I miss my husband."

"Lucky man," Naomi said, raising her glass in a toast.

 

***

 

It was in Rio that Jack caught up with her. 

Rose peered up at him through her sunglasses from where she was reclined on a beach chair. "Are you seriously wearing that coat on the beach in Rio?" she asked.

He shed it and started to roll up his sleeves. "Give me a break, I just teleported from Cardiff. Where it's raining and freezing cold, in case you were wondering."

"How'd you know I was here?" she asked, indicating that he should take an adjacent chair.

"Tracked your mobile phone," he said. Off of her frown, he said, "Hey, we're Torchwood, it's what we do."

Rose put her romance novel into her bag and smirked. "It's okay, I'm actually happy to see you."

His grin was salacious. "How happy?"

"Stop it."

Jack took on a more serious expression. "I saw the Doctor."

"I guess he told you what happened," Rose said with a sigh.

"Yeah. I'm really sorry, Rose."

"Is he okay?" she asked.

Jack shrugged. "You know the Doctor, he's enigmatic. He babbles when he's genuinely happy and he babbles when he's pretending to be happy. He misses you."

"I miss him too."

"He said you were angry with him for keeping the danger to you a secret."

Rose shrugged. "I was too sad to be properly angry. And I don't know, maybe in his shoes, I would've done the same thing. Anyway, anger is not what led me to go on walkabout, no matter what he thinks."

"Why, then?"

"A lot of reasons. I was running away from the weight of grief in the TARDIS. The Doctor's capacity for guilt and self-flagellation is great, as you well know. I think the ship was grieving too; it was suffocating me."

Jack put his hands behind his head and tilted his face up to the sun. "The Doctor didn't say it in so many words, but I got the impression that the three of you were quite happy. I was surprised, to be honest."

"Surprised that the Doctor managed to get along with himself?" she asked with a smile.

"Surprised they didn't tear each other apart fighting over you."

"I think when either of them felt jealous, they dealt with it by fucking the other one senseless." Jack's surprised expression made Rose laugh. "Come on, Jack, you of all people shouldn't be surprised by that."

"It's not that I'm surprised, it's that I can't believe I didn't get to watch."

"It _was_ really nice to watch," she agreed, a wistful smile on her face. "I miss the Doctor who died, and then I feel bad for missing him, as if having the one who's left isn't enough. It _is_ enough."

"I'm sure the Doctor understands that."

"And then sometimes I feel like we used him, like he came into being and we used him to save the universe and destroy the Daleks and get our marriage back on track and then we threw him away," Rose said with a frown.

"You didn't force him to do anything, Rose, he was his own man. He did what he did of his own free will." Jack reached over and took her hand. "Sounds like you've got a fairly large capacity for guilt yourself, Rosie."

"I know." She sat up and turned to face Jack. "You remember how intoxicating it was, travelling with the Doctor? How your whole world revolved around him? How he was so much more magical and terrible than anything in your life had ever been before, or likely ever would be again?"

Jack swallowed. "Yeah," he rasped. "I remember."

"Now imagine being his partner for more than a decade. Even though things gradually changed between us - he asks for my opinion more than he used to, and I help him fly the TARDIS. It's not that he doesn't value me; he does. But still, being with him, it's hard not to forget who you are." She raked her fingers through her hair. "I think I needed to remember who I am."

"And have you?"

Rose stared out at the water for a long time, her legs pulled up and chin resting on her knees. "Yeah. Yeah, I think so." She looked over at Jack with a smile. "Do you know where the Doctor is right now?"

"London."

"Mind giving me a lift? This flying on planes thing is rubbish."


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My final chapter notes from the time: A massive, massive thank you to everyone who stuck around through this odyssey. As I've said many times, once this plot came to me, it hung on with the tenacity of a bulldog. I knew that I was getting way too wrapped up in my own AU, and that I was getting way too into reworking Russell's scripts, and that the story was going to have more kinky Tencest than many people wanted and would be way too sad for many others. In spite of all that, I wrote it, and I am awed and humbled that so many people stayed with me through the roller coaster that was this story. Your comments make it all worth doing.
> 
> Also, an extra special thank you to jfiliberti, who put up with this monstrosity even though she was going through a crazy busy time herself. She was immeasurably helpful, not just with typos and grammar, but with all aspects of the story. She rocks, in the modern sense, she rocks.

"How many seconds are there in a year?" Michael asked, kicking his feet against the chair he sat on in Donna's front room.

"Thirty-one million, five hundred thirty-six thousand," the Doctor answered.

Martha smiled and looked over at Donna, who was bringing in tea. "That's handy; he asks me questions like that and I have to get a calculator."

"So how many seconds would a human being live?" Michael continued.

"Well, it varies, doesn't it?" the Doctor said. "People live for different amounts of time. Some live to be very old, and some ... some don't." Martha watched carefully as something flickered in the Doctor's eyes and then was gone. "But," he continued in a voice just slightly too loud, "assuming an Earth-based human who lives to be one hundred, that's a little over three billion seconds."

Michael laughed, delighted with his Time Lord calculator. "That's a lot of seconds."

"Depends on your perspective." 

After staying with the Milligans for several days, the Doctor offered to take all of them to London in the TARDIS for a visit. Martha had been happy to accept; it gave the kids a chance to see their grandparents without the bother of an eight hour flight, and it gave her a chance to catch up with the family and friends she'd left behind when she moved to New York. And of course Michael and Sophie had been over the moon at the idea of flying in the TARDIS, and had treated it like the roller coaster ride that it felt like. The Doctor promised to cheat with the timeline a bit and return them home right after they left so that the kids wouldn't miss school. Martha tried not to think about what would happen if his piloting skills weren't up to that task.

The Doctor had disappeared for a few days after they'd arrived, which had worried Martha not a little, but then she heard from Jack that he'd turned up in Cardiff. Now the TARDIS was back in London and parked in Donna's back garden.

In the time he'd spent with her, the Doctor hadn't talked about what was going on inside his own head, and he hadn't talked about the other Doctor at all after their initial conversation. When he had referenced something that he had done with Rose, he hadn't mentioned if it had been while the other Doctor had been with them. Mainly, he'd spent long hours with Michael and Sophie, and Martha had admired his patience and willingness to do whatever they wanted, whether it was making animals out of Play-Doh and colouring with markers with Sophie or playing Stratego and discussing the intricacies of Star Wars canon with Michael. Martha supposed he was healing in his own way, even if he wasn't facing his grief head on.

"What's the grossest alien you've ever met?" Michael asked, and the Doctor launched into another story which soon had the children squealing in a mixture of delight and disgust. Martha and Donna shared a knowing smile - he really would be okay, she thought. At least, he would when Rose came back.

 

***

 

Donna hurried across the garden in the early-morning chill and let herself inside the blue police box with her old key. She spotted the Doctor sitting on the jumpseat on the other side of the console, but he didn't acknowledge her, instead staring at something in his hand. As she walked over to him, he closed his fingers over whatever it was and looked up, smiling a thin smile at her.

"Joining us for breakfast?" she asked, sitting down next to him.

"Yeah, thanks," he said. He looked down at his closed fist, but made no move to get up.

Donna narrowed her eyes at him. "You all right?"

He sighed. "What if I can't make her happy any more, Donna?"

She wanted to feel pleased that he hadn't answered with 'I'm always all right,' but Donna found that the plaintive tone in his voice just broke her heart. "She loves you. Everything you've been through, she's never wavered from that."

"She loved him too, Donna, so much. It was easier for him to open himself up completely with her, and ... you didn't see them together. You didn't see the way he looked at her when he was ..." His voice wavered slightly.

"No, but I'd be surprised if it was that different from the way you look at her. I travelled with you for years, remember? And there was never anything plainer on your face than the way you felt about her." She smiled. "Do you remember the first time you really talked to me about Rose? You showed me those pictures, and I knew then how very much you loved her. I promise you, she knows too."

The Doctor finally opened his fist. Donna reached out tentatively and picked up the ring sitting there, the twin of the one the Doctor wore on his own left hand. He'd been clutching it tightly, and it left a faint impression on his palm. He sighed heavily. "I don't know what to do with it. We'd just given it to him; he hadn't even worn it for a whole day when ..." 

"Maybe there's some way you can memorialize him, here on the TARDIS," Donna suggested.

The Doctor stood up and paced around the console, raking both hands through his hair. "You said something about breakfast?" he asked, changing the subject.

Donna knew better than to try to push him. "Yeah, just come up to the house when you're ready." She walked over and opened the TARDIS door.

"Donna? Do you think she'd like that? A reminder of him?"

She smiled to herself, looking out across the lawn. "Why don't you ask her yourself?"

He must've heard something in the tone of her voice, because the Doctor was at Donna's side in an instant to see what she was looking at: Rose and Jack standing at the back door. Rose gave them a little wave.

And then they were both running, the Doctor and Rose, and were in each other's arms in the middle of the lawn almost before Donna could register that they had moved. Donna and Jack watched the reunion, just as they had so many years ago in Cardiff, when Rose had finally returned from the parallel world. They had endured so much since then, and Donna's fervent wish as she made her way over to them was that the universe would allow them a little respite before they had to deal with whatever life was going to throw at them next.

 

***

 

Rose watched him sleeping.

After sharing a joyous embrace and breakfast at Donna's, Rose and the Doctor had finally said their goodbyes and returned together to the TARDIS. As soon as they were through the doors he had met her eyes and the weeks of absence had hit her like a physical blow, suddenly she couldn't get close enough to him. She barely remembered making their way to the bedroom, undressing ... but that moment when he had entered her, his eyes boring into hers, _that_ moment Rose would remember and cherish forever.

Now he was asleep, and Rose was enjoying the rarity of seeing him so unguarded. It reminded her with a pang of the other Doctor, whose sleep habits had been much closer to her own, and even though there was pain in thinking of him, it also made her heart swell with love for the man beside her.

Perhaps he sensed the intensity of her thoughts, because the Doctor's eyelashes fluttered and he opened his eyes.

"Hello," he whispered, and Rose pressed her lips to his in answer. When she broke the kiss, he smiled. "I missed you."

"I could tell. I missed you too," Rose said, feeling a wave of longing surge in her heart. "Desperately." He pulled her down into a hug, his arms tight around her chest. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed the feeling of his body all along the length of hers, not just in a sexual sense, but for the comfort and intimacy of it. And the way he smelled - she'd missed the way he smelled. "Can we just stay in bed for the next three days or so?" she asked against his neck.

"I think that's a capital idea," he rasped, threading the fingers of one hand into her hair. They kissed slowly, teasingly, for a long time, not yet ready to make love again but enjoying the first stirrings of renewed desire for each other.

"So where was the best place you went on your travels?" the Doctor asked, settling her head against his chest after a while.

"Well, the beaches in Rio were pretty fantastic," she said with a smile. "But it was all a bit ... hollow without you."

"Are you sorry you went?"

"No," Rose answered after some thought. "I needed the time away, to get some perspective on everything."

"And did you?" He asked it mildly, but Rose could feel the tension in his body. In spite of the immediate evidence to the contrary, he was still afraid that she might decide she'd had enough and leave him.

She lifted her head from his chest and looked into the Doctor's eyes. "I realized that being with you and being Rose Tyler aren't mutually exclusive. I never stopped being Rose Tyler, actually; the fact that a lot of who I am is shaped by you isn't a bad thing. It's what happens when you spend your life with someone." She smiled. "That being said, if you ever hide a danger to my health from me again, I _will_ regenerate you."

"I know," he said, grimacing. "I'm sorry."

"Apology accepted." Rose lay her head back down on his chest, her fingers absently combing through the smattering of hair there. "And I realized that I'm always going to cherish the time we had with the other Doctor. I'm always going to hold a little place in my heart for him, and that's okay. It doesn't diminish my love for you - it does the opposite. You know?"

"Yeah." He let out a long breath, relaxing against her. "Rose?"

"Hmm?" She planted a soft kiss on his chest.

"He gave me what he thought I wanted. He _knew_ me, and he thought ... he thought that I would choose keeping you over his life."

Rose realized that this was essentially his guilt over the Ixari on a smaller scale. Then, the choice had been between losing Rose and an action that indirectly led to the deaths of 10,000 Ixari. Now he feared that he had essentially chosen between her life and that of his duplicate, even if it was his duplicate that had done the choosing. But there was one very important difference this time. "If it had been _your_ brain that had been compatible with mine, if you could have given him the gift that he gave to you, would you have?"

"In a heartbeat."

Rose lifted her head again and gently brushed her lips over his. "Then don't let this tear you apart inside. He gave us something immeasurably valuable; let's not waste it." Another tender kiss. "I love you ... _so_ much. I always will."

He answered her by deepening the kiss, his hands becoming bolder and running down her back to her bum. Rose felt his cock harden against her inner thigh, and she gasped at the answering surge of desire and warmth between her legs. "I _really_ missed you," she said. 

"Show me," the Doctor growled.

 

***

 

Perhaps it was a glitch in the TARDIS' systems. Perhaps the other Doctor had set a delay, or perhaps the TARDIS itself had kept it hidden until it deemed the Doctor and Rose ready. For whatever reason, six months went by before the holographic recording launched.

They had just returned from several days in the 17th century, and Rose was about to go take a proper shower while the Doctor fiddled with the controls, preparing to take them into the Vortex. The only thing Rose heard him say was "What's _this_?" before the holographic image of the other Doctor appeared in the console room.

The colour was monochromatic, but Rose knew immediately that it was him; he wore only a T-shirt under his suit coat, and that was something that the Time Lord never did. After a second, the image spoke.

"Is this thing recording? Right! Um, hello! I guess if you're seeing this, then I had to pull the Time Lord consciousness out of Rose's brain the only way I knew how to, and it killed me. Or I suppose I could have died some other way, but that would be disappointing, wouldn't it? Not likely to be nearly as noble." He smiled nervously. "Anyway, sorry about that. I mean, I'm not sorry I did it, that is, I'm not sorry I will do it. But I'm sorry that my dying hurt you. I'm sorry there wasn't a way to do it that would have left all of us happy and alive and with our memories intact.

"Ah, well. I should probably get to the point, shouldn't I? Before I came along, we - that is, you - weren't having the happiest of times. And now I've left you, so it's probably again not the happiest of times. I just ..." the image brought his hand up and rubbed the back of his neck. "I know how much you love each other, because it's how much I love each of you. That's why I did it - because I was the only one who could, and because the two of you belong together. I couldn't have lived with myself, knowing there was a way to save Rose, and not acting.

"I know you might not agree with my choice. You might both be furious with me, I suppose, but it doesn't matter. Doesn't change the fundamental rightness of the Doctor, with Rose Tyler, in the TARDIS. Just as it should be." He smiled a heartbreakingly sweet smile. "So be happy. I suppose that's my point: be happy. Have a fantastic life for me."

The image flickered and disappeared.

They said nothing for a several seconds, both of them staring at the empty space where the hologram had been. Rose realized she was trembling, and then the Doctor was beside her, gently pulling her into his arms. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I had no idea that was there."

She sniffled against the shoulder of his suit coat. "It's okay. And anyway, he was right."

"Yeah," the Doctor rasped, breathing into her hair. "He was."

Rose laughed a watery laugh, pulling back to look at him. "Leaving that recording, that's so _you_." The Doctor snorted in response. "You all right?" she asked him.

"Of course," he answered quickly, then he frowned. "No I'm not, I'm sad."

"Me too." Rose threaded her fingers with his.

"How about," he said expansively, "you take your shower, and then we'll go pick up some ice cream and curl up on the couch under a blanket and watch a film. How would that be?"

Her grin was wide. "That would be wonderful."

The Doctor bounded over to the console. "Setting coordinates for Rose Tyler's favourite ice cream in the entire universe!" he announced, and Rose giggled. He adjusted one of the controls, next to where a single silver ring that hung on a chain. As the TARDIS lurched into motion and the two people inside headed off to their next destination in space and time, the ring reflected the green light of the time rotor.


End file.
